Me:
>     Hi. I have a question: why are there so many characters out 
> there that look like Shampoo? There's Primera (sp?) from Magic Knight
> Rayearth, and Deep Sea from Slayers... And have any of you seen Mimi
> and Nene? They show up a few episodes into Slayers Nezt, and they're
> practically Shampoo clones: the hair colour, hairstyle, accent,
> behaviour, clothes, and they fight, too. What's going on? Does this
> have some significance that I'm not aware of?

Don:
> I'm not aware that Shampoo being a common character prototype from 
> the anime/manga I read.

Okay, but I gave examples. 

> Though most anime/manga has a character who is clueless/ditzy/out 
> of touch with reality, and you can roughly lump Shampoo into that 
> category, but it'd like saying Akane is a common character prototype
> because most Anime has the the tomboy prototype character too.

Not to be rude, but what are you trying to say? That you disagree? How
can you disagree with a question? I didn't say that Shampoo was a
prototype, I said that there are lots of characters that LOOK like her,
and lots of characters that ACT like her. I've only seen two that are
both. My question was, is there a reason for this? And some people did
give me good answers, too. (Thanks, by the way.) 
Going back to my point, I wasn't trying to say that Rumiko Takahashi
made up Shampoo and then half a dozen other authors copied her. That
would be a very stupid thing to say, not to mention offensive.