The Shadow Library or What? DVD Series

There, Next to Dragon Ball

I was looking through a few old pictures here on Niche of Time when I ran across this one from 2022 of one of my old DVD shelves. My attention was drawn to an anime boxed set: Magic User’s Club (1999); I bought it when I was deep in my anime phase. I wondered what I had said about it, and then found it was not in the Niche, at least not in any searchable form. And thus I opened up a little mystery.

Magic User’s Club is basically a high school romance series, strung along a sort of sci-fi fantasy premise. It seems an enigmatic alien spaceship has descended near Tokyo. It does nothing but sends out probes and any resistance or attack is soon easily destroyed. Most just shrug off its presence after a while, but many fear it will eventually conquer the Earth. No human technology can affect it.

Enter a high school’s “Magic User’s Club”. Most of the school thinks it is devoted to stage magic, but its teenage president has found a real book of spells and is teaching his fellow club members to do real magic. The club’s most powerful member is a clumsy, shy girl who has a crush on the president, who is too distracted by the other pretty girls in the club. But they think magic might be the way to get rid of the alien menace that has been dubbed ‘The Bell’ (because of its shape).

It consisted of an original OVA of six episodes (ending with the transformation and nullification of the Bell), and then a TV show of thirteen episodes of club hijinks. As I say, a mediocre high school romance with a juvenile fantasy premise. Somewhat intriguing, rather in the vein of Inuyasha or YuYu Hakusho or even Harry Potter, but once I actually saw it all, I was not too engaged with it.

So here’s the mystery. It’s not on the shelves anymore, but what did I do with it? Sold it, gave it away, or merely tucked it out of sight somewhere so I’d have more room on the shelves? It’s only been three years, but, as far as my memory goes, it may as well have been twenty. It must not have made much an impression on me at all. I guess I’ll never ‘ken the which of it’ until I do another grand sorting or the sea gives up its dead. It exists, or like Schrodinger’s cat, may not exist for sure, either in the Archive or … the Shadow Library.

I see now that it’s going for about $125. Figures.