Magic Knight Rayearth Episode 1: Original 1994 Ending Song Returns, Fans Cry

Magic Knight Rayearth's new TV anime premiered its first episode on October 7, a full-series remake arriving 32 years after CLAMP's original 1994 adaptation — and it closed the episode with the same, unaltered ending theme the 1994 version used, "Yuzurenai Negai."

Across the video that collected Japan's reaction to the premiere (275 comments total), the top-liked comment (103 likes) joked about whether the finale would bring the original movie's theme song back too, while plenty of others said hearing "Yuzurenai Negai" play unchanged was what actually made them cry. A lot of the thread also compared the new art directly to CLAMP's original manga linework, and one lower-liked comment turned into a short argument over whether Rayearth really deserves credit as the series that started the summoned-to-another-world genre.

Magic Knight Rayearth's new TV anime aired its first episode on October 7, a full-series remake arriving 32 years after CLAMP's original adaptation. The episode closes on the unaltered original ending theme, "Yuzurenai Negai" ("An Unyielding Wish"), and a Japanese reaction-compilation video built around the premiere pulled in 275 comments of its own. Commenters spent the thread comparing the new footage shot-for-shot against the decades-old original, weighing whether the staff actually understood what made the source material work, and bracing for the one scene everyone was waiting on: the ending theme.

A good chunk of the thread is just relief that the people making this actually get the source material. Commenters kept comparing the new linework directly to Mokona Apapa's original manga art from CLAMP's serialization — not the old anime's style, but the manga's, which several said the original TV adaptation never fully captured in the first place.

Then the ending theme hit, and the thread basically turned into a group cry. A few viewers said they half-expected a brand-new show to swap in a modern theme song instead of digging up something this old, so getting the unaltered original back is what actually broke them. Several said they hadn't thought about the song in years and weren't prepared for how fast it brought the tears back.

Not everything in the comments was pure nostalgia, though. One lower-liked reply pushed back hard on a claim made earlier in the same video — that Rayearth was the trailblazer for stories about ordinary people summoned to another world — and wasn't shy about calling that framing out as flatly wrong.

The thread didn't dwell on the argument for long before drifting back into trivia and relief — the kind of small, affectionate detail-spotting that only happens when an audience has decided a show is safe to love again.

Thirty-two years on, that's about as strong an endorsement as a remake can get: an audience that spent the episode bracing for disappointment, and ended it in tears for the opposite reason — grateful that something they loved as kids got handed back to them intact instead of being modernized out of recognition.