Ask John: How Many Saber Marionette Clones Are There?

Question:
How many series have spawned from the Saber Marionette series? Also, would you say Chobits is a watered down version of SMJ?

Answer:
I’m not exactly sure if I understand your question. If you’re wondering exactly how many proper Saber Marionette anime series there are, there are four:

SM Gals Saber Marionette R
Saber Marionette J
Mata Mata Saber Marionette J
Saber Marionette J to X

If you’re curious about how many different anime series have cloned Saber Marionette’s theme of a young man living with one or more devoted android girls, you’d actually have to include Saber Marionette in that list as well. If we look at the history of robot girls in anime, the earliest example of cybernetic girl power I’m aware of is Uran, Astro Boy’s robotic sister. But Uran doesn’t exactly fit the bill because she wasn’t a servant to a human master. We may begin to see the origins of the robotic woman serving a human in Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999 TV series from 1978 in which several android females served passengers aboard the Galaxy Express. The first true female android absolutely devoted to a single human master that I’m aware of is Lady, the partner of Buichi Terasawa’s 1982 heroic Space Adventure Cobra. Another android girl devoted to a senior master appears in the 1993 Ghost Sweeper Mikami anime TV series. Doctor Chaos’ android assistant and bodyguard Maria probably owes her name to the mother of all female androids, the Maria of Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis.

But to specifically narrow in on the exact format of young-looking female robot indentured to a teenage human boy, I think credit goes to the 1992 OAV series Bannou Bunka Neko Musume, better known as All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku. Only five months after the Nuku-Nuku OAV series ended, in May 1994, Satoru Akahori introduced his Saber Marionettes as a prose short story published in the October 1994 issue of Dragon Magazine. The SM Gals Saber Marionette R OAV series debuted on Japanese home video a year later, in May 1995. Since the 1994 introduction of the vivacious android girl Nuku Nuku, her spiritual descendants have appeared in anime series including Saber Marionette, Steel Angel Kurumi, To Heart, Outlaw Star, Chobits, Hand Maid May and its sequel Hand Maid Mai, Mahoromatic, the hentai OAV series Kowaremono, and Sumeba Miyako no Cosmos-sou Suttoko Taisen Dokkoida. There are probably others, but I’m either not familiar with them, or they’ve temporarily slipped my mind.