Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 66 · 12:18am March 20th
Some winter shows will be ending in the next couple of weeks. It's been a good season, but still waiting to see if the ones I like are concluding or will get additional seasons. But the one and only featured item this week is... Sailor Moon, after the break, since the Crystal reboot just ended.
I'll toss in a couple more YouTube shorts at the end so it's not only Sailor Moon (and one of them was rather good!), but it's going to be long enough with that already, since there were three different incarnations of the original before even considering the reboot.
I want to tackle this in phases. First, to go over the premise of each section, then to compare and contrast the different versions that came out over the years.
So, season 1, simply titled Sailor Moon (Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon), is 46 episodes. A middle-school girl suddenly gets confronted by a talking cat when a monster attacks the city. The cat coaches her through how to transform into a magical girl and use her powers to defeat the monster, though she's pretty inept at it. Well, more that she's easily discouraged and klutzy, but she rises to the challenge when push comes to shove, and one of her most enduring qualities is faith in her friends (which would no doubt exasperate Emperor Palpatine), once she gains some who will help her with all this. There's a legendary kingdom that used to exist on the moon, and is fated to again, with guardians incarnated for each planet (including Pluto!) to defend it from evil. Like any season, the bad guys are structured as a command hierarchy, so they end up being mini-boss fights as Our Heroes work their way up to the head honcho. And like any season, the bad guys' plans involve targeting a victim each week as a way of collecting energy (or something that may as well be) to bring the uber-boss to full strength and take over the world/galaxy/universe/whatever.
It's no surprise that a lot of this turns into "monster of the week" fights, but the good guys are given enough characterization to make them interesting, plus they always manage to have a compelling slow-burn overall plot going behind the scenes. While fighting off these repeated monsters, there's tension over who can be considered a friend or an enemy, and even one or two of the baddies teeter on the edge of redemption. Really, the best part of this season was meeting all the characters and getting the world-building, especially as the number of Sailor Warriors gradually grows. It was fun seeing them discover each of the girls in turn and adding them to the force. It's not one of the stronger plots, but it is the season with that new-car smell. It has a rather stark ending, at least in the proper telling of it—more on this later.
In general, there are two things about this show that hit my sweet spot. One, that the girls all have differing abilities such that each will get a chance to shine as their power is best suited for the situation, or that it takes them all functioning together. And two, rediscovering lost memories.
Season 2, Sailor Moon R, started oddly, with an arc about two new classmates who are aliens, making... you guessed it, monsters of the week to drain energy from appropriate targets to fuel their plans. As I understand it, this arc is not in the manga and was done in the anime to buy the manga enough time to complete the intended arc. There's not a lot going on here, and it's fairly polarizing as to whether viewers liked it. I found it boring, but it was the single example of the entire antagonist cast being redeemable, so it has that going for it. Then the main arc starts. A strange little girl who looks a lot like Usagi shows up, and Usagi's family is seemingly brainwashed into thinking she's supposed to be there. Amid this, a new group of antagonists appears, bent on capturing the little girl so they can change the past and defeat the Moon Kingdom in the future. Failing this, they retreat to the future, where they have the Moon Kingdom held to a stalemate, at least until they try corrupting the little girl. All told, that's 43 episodes.
The draw to this season for me was mainly the lowest-level baddies in the main arc. S1 had shown at least one of the baddies to be redeemable, but in what will become a theme for the rest of the show, S2 had them all be redeemable, except for the one at the top who'd been deceiving everyone. The further up the ladder you go, the more work it takes to do so, and the bottom-tier ones were kind of sweet in the type of redemption story I like, where they didn't understand things like love and relationships, and now that they do, they embrace it fully.
Season 3, Sailor Moon S, was by far the strongest overarching plot in its 38 episodes. Once again, bad guys, draining energy, yadda yadda yadda, but numerous conflicts come into play. Sailor Pluto had been briefly introduced the previous season, but here, Uranus and Neptune also appear, but they don't necessarily align with the others in their goals, mirroring how Tuxedo Mask had been introduced in S1. In addition, the little girl from S2, Chibi Usa, returns, and a friend of hers is foreshadowed as a harbinger of destruction. That played multiple factions against each other, not least of which is Usagi's steadfast faith in people making her refuse to believe this friend could ever be the monster prophecy shows her to be. The baddies are targeting people who are pure of heart, and in what will also become a pattern for future seasons, the girls themselves, as their secret identities, become victims of attacks, leading to a strangely compelling yet also funny character arc for Sailor Venus in particular. It's not the first time the good guys and bad guys somewhat overlap in what they want to achieve, just for different reasons, and that's another sweet spot for me.
Season 4, Sailor Moon Super S, at 39 episodes, has the baddies looking for a magical pegasus who's hiding in the dream realm, so they target people expected to have beautiful dreams to root out which one is harboring him. They're set up like a circus, and the initial trio of henchmen eventually gives way to a quartet of young-ish girls once their failures stack up, and there's a running theme of illusion. This season was the first to start making some more odd choices in the fan-service sector. That group of four enemies are only maybe twelve years old, and yet they're all quite busty and wearing very revealing outfits. The draw for this season was once again Usagi's unflagging optimism, in this case refusing to let the bad guy wallow in lying to herself. She can see the good in anyone. On the down side, the final couple of seasons tended to ignore the side characters that were nice to see in early seasons, like Usagi's friend Naru.
Season 5, Sailor Moon Sailor Stars, then just made an end run with all those oddities during its 34 episodes, bringing the total to an even 200. I still liked the overall premise, but as the attack names had been getting a little strange, they just hit a new level here. Star Gentle Uterus? Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss? I do wonder how the VAs can say some of that stuff with a straight face, but I guess that's what makes them good at their jobs. And the outfits, too: the henchmen, and the new good guy Sailor Warriors, look like they're wearing leather bondage gear. Okay, as to plot: The S4 villain makes a resurgence and tries to trap the girls, but they resolve her arc more satisfactorily than the previous season did, plus some nice pairings of the girls force them to work together in unconventional ways. Then some new Sailor Warriors show up, who are from elsewhere in the galaxy, because their world was destroyed and they're looking for their princess who barely escaped. Both groups of Sailor Warriors are unsure if the other can be trusted to help them. The newcomers know their princess will be disguised as a normal girl, so they figure the best way to draw those is to form a boy band, and it does add some romantic tension with Usagi that was interesting—Mamoru is studying abroad and has been incommunicado. As is fitting for the endcap to a series, the stakes run galactic in proportion, and it's all hands on deck. This is mostly the original five girls, and the others are oddly absent from the middle of the season For Reasons.
The middle three seasons each had a movie as well, but they're all standalone stories. The Sailor Moon R movie basically had an alien who was a childhood friend of Mamoru's return and get jealous of the attention he pays to Usagi, leading him to want to destroy Earth as revenge. The Sailor Moon S movie is about an ice princess who wants to freeze the Earth, and it parallels a romance arc between an astronomer (with whom Luna falls in love) and an astronaut, so solving the one problem also solves the other. I barely remember this one. The Sailor Moon Super S movie felt a lot like that season's plot, in a way, in that it was similar to a circus theme, and the motifs of dreams and illusions prevailed. Children are being brainwashed into creating a dream world where they can live as they want to, and we all know how such plots turn out. It came with a short, Ami's First Love, that just has Sailor Mercury competing with a new academic rival, convinced he's another magical enemy.
Next order of business: what of all the versions? There's the manga, of course, which I haven't read, so I largely don't know whether the original or the reboot hews closer to it. But then the original had multiple versions as well. Aside from the sub, that is, but it's not as easy to find as you might think. When the show first got a dub so that it could migrate to the US after-school market, a company called Dic did the honors. I watched these as they came out. However, they only got to the part of the second season where the bad guys cede the past and retreat to the future before they got canceled for low viewership. I didn't know that, though, as it's kind of a natural pause point. I thought maybe it was done and just came to a weak conclusion. It went back through the order, and I watched again, hoping it'd continue past that point, but nope.
Several years later, another company, Cloverway, picked up from where Dic left off and went through seasons 3 and 4 as well before they quit, and I saw some of those in reruns on Toonami. They mostly used the same VAs, but Usagi was different. Finally, many years later, Viz started back at the beginning and dubbed all five seasons. Thus to watch it all, you necessarily have to watch some of all three versions, unless you stick to Viz alone. Is that the better path?
Reddit is pretty split on that, at least in terms of the voice cast. The Viz dub is in an era where dubs are pretty uniformly better, but the Dic/Cloverway cast actually did a rather good job. I lean a little toward liking the older dub more, but as I'd seen those already—well, not all of them, as I'd never seen the end of season 2 or the beginning of season 3 from Cloverway—I chose Viz when I decided to watch it all from the start again and finally see season 5. And I agree with Reddit: there's not a clear winner in dub quality. However, Cloverway, to some degree, and Dic were notable in censoring various parts of the show. Viz restored all that, so even more content! What had been censored, though?
It's a long-standing thing in anime for someone to be in the bath and there being a visible, if hazy, silhouette of them under the water. Too titillating for the preteen audience! The water becomes opaque. Some episodes had scenes cut, and some entire episodes were cut, the former usually for violence against children, the latter for that as well but more often just to trim out inessential material to rein in the number of episodes. They are rather long seasons, after all. A bit of fan service, too, though it's debatable whether that even qualifies. There are times you can see up one of the girls' skirts, but that's always done in their hero forms, and that's why it's debatable to me. Their uniforms are essentially leotards with a skirt and accessories added on top, and a leotard is the kind of thing that can be worn by itself, so it's not like seeing underwear or anything. It's on the very tame side. But that all had to go. Plus the one time that actually was underwear in an early season: a demon-possessed boy flips up the teacher's skirt. Though it is of questionable taste that the character most consistently seen with the under-skirt leotard part exposed was Chibi Usa.
Probably the most famous example, though, was the romance angle between Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune in seasons 3 and 4. The Cloverway dub painted them as rather affectionate cousins, which was thinly veiled, and frankly doesn't rule out the romance anyway. Not to mention Uranus getting flirty with Usagi at times. There were also cases of effeminate male bad guys being changed into female characters, like season 1's Zoisite, especially when they preferred to target male victims, like Fish's Eye from the fourth season.
And speaking of Zoisite, one thing I really liked when watching the original as it came out is the theme of naming the bad guys after minerals. Not every single one of them, but most of them. Season 1 even exclusively went for green minerals. By season 3, only the lowest-tier baddies had mineral names, and season 4 had only one, Tiger's Eye, if you're willing to stretch (it's actually just a reference to the animal, not the mineral).
Sometimes the censorship was kind of subtle, though. I alluded to the ending of season 1 as being pretty stark, and even the Dic dub kind of let it be implied that a significant number of the major characters had died (which wouldn't be the last time, though of course there are ways to remedy that).
And then in 2014 came the reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal. The art was more modern, but people complained about it being obvious CGI. I have to claim ignorance on whether this stuck to the manga better or strayed further. I enjoyed this, but it varied by season as to whether I thought it was better. Whereas the original averaged 40 episodes per season, Crystal stuck to 13 for each of seasons 1-3, then remade season 4 as a pair of movies (Sailor Moon Eternal) and did the same thing for season 5 (Sailor Moon Cosmos).
First, the neutral differences. With such a curtailed run, they couldn't explore every plot point. It skips season 2's Ail and Ann arc, as well as the opening arc of season 5.
Second, what did it do worse? It removed a lot of anticipation. Take season 1. In the original, a lot of the fun was wondering when they'd discover the next Sailor Warrior. You have space for that in 40+ episodes. In 13, it takes you nearly half the run, so they have to happen rapidly, pretty much all consecutively. Similar with the lower-level bad guys being defeated. In Cosmos, there's zero intrigue of the Starlights and Sailor Warriors figuring out who each other are—they know immediately—and no sooner does the first mini boss show up than she's killed, and her colleagues don't last any longer. They also all but removed the girls' personalities. All the funny interactions from the original? Rei and Usagi constantly picking at each other; Minako, Usagi, and Makoto commiserating about being substandard students; Ami dreaming about being a doctor; Makoto wistfully comparing every guy she meets to a past boyfriend; many of them encountering old acquaintances; numerous side characters who figure prominently, like Naru and Umino—all that is gone. The girls just tend to run together in how there are few differences between them. Characterization suffers. Personal taste, but I preferred the original's take on who and what Hotaru is in season 3. And speaking of her, both versions disappoint where she's concerned. She's got a really badass attack, and the only time it ever gets used is off camera. Fitting the plot in a smaller package means missing out on some powerful moments, like Naru falling in love with Nephrite during season 1 and Minako obsessing about being targeted as someone pure of heart during season 3. Another thing that always impresses me just because of the work involved, especially in a hand-drawn series, is variety in outfits. Some do make repeat appearances, but the show is constantly giving them new and creative things to wear, and it lends a nice touch of authenticity.
What was better? To a degree, cutting out the repetitive "monster of the week" plots did keep it from dragging, and as much as they denied the protagonists much personality, they really invested the antagonists with much more complex and sympathetic back stories. Really, the bad guys often shine more than the heroes. On this part, I'm pretty sure it does match the manga better: it greatly expands on there being Sailor Warriors throughout the universe, many of whom have been corrupted. Even in the original, that was a theme of season 5, but it only brings in eight more who are explicitly called such; Crystal has some even at the end of season 4 (or its equivalent), and then dozens by the end of Cosmos.
In all, I think season 1 is kind of a wash. The pluses and minuses even out. I think Crystal did a better job of season 2, but the original did a notably better job of season 3. And Crystal really didn't have the space to develop seasons 4-5 well, so they feel really rushed, the latter more so, since it involves a much larger amount of lore. On the whole, I like the original better, and for all that the Dic dub might have had the best voice acting by a bit, you might as well watch the Viz one for its completeness. Crystal is not quite as good but still worth watching, especially to see the introduction of lots of Sailor Warriors in Cosmos.
Rating: very good (original series), decent (original series movies), very good (Crystal).
200 episodes + 3 specials + 3 movies (original), 39 episodes + 4 movies (Crystal), relevant genres: drama, action, romance, comedy, fantasy.
And a few YouTube shorts. And none of them are by ChungKang this week!
Friendship (short film)—okay, finally got back to something other than ChungKang that was labeled as "award winning," this one by immix studios, and... this was just okay. It starts out with a girl boarding a school bus and someone beckoning to her to share a seat, but it's unclear whether they already knew each other and the first girl is just nervous around others, or if the second girl was being kind to a stranger. It then proceeds to show snapshots from their parallel lives, and it goes pretty much everywhere you expect it to, even making some eye-roll-worthy grabs for cheap feels. Art was an interesting style, and the music was functional. Both fine enough but not standout. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, slice of life.
Drawn to You (short film)—by students at the Seneca School of Creative Arts and Animation. This was cute, if heavy-handed. A girl has drawn a picture of two girls holding hands, and evidence around the room suggests she's an aspiring comic artist. Her mom sees this, gets angry, and tears the two apart, and only hangs back up the one presumably meant to resemble her daughter, adding a guy for her to hold hands with. Yeah... very heavy-handed. It's unclear at first whether the daughter likes girls herself or just likes to draw F/F shipping, though the stills shown during the closing credits clear that up (as well as do a really rushed job of giving Mom a redemption arc). The drawings come alive and try to reunite. My only real problem with it is the way the girl reacts to the guy her mom drew. Not liking guys, fair enough. And it did start out that way, just having her persona treat him as something uninteresting, but he doesn't do anything wrong, and yet she ends up reacting to him as if he's vile, which went a step too far imo, insofar as it doesn't delineate between her attitude toward him as a concept and her attitude toward him as representative of her mother's mindset. Otherwise cute, and it's got a nice disposition of the two girls during the credits. Art was simplistic but good, and the animation was smooth. Music was nothing noteworthy, but not bad. Rating: decent, and high in that range, relevant genres: drama, romance, coming of age.
Period Drama (short film)—by a couple of students at the Ringling College of Art and Design. The title had me wondering which sense of the word it'd take, and... it uses both. Eleven-year-old Georgiana notices she's bleeding, and in the Victorian Era when this takes place, people weren't proactive about telling girls what to expect as they mature, so she immediately assumes she's dying. That's surely not a new plot to tackle, and for all that it goes pretty much where you think it will, the presentation is well done, and the humor consistently lands. One of the better takes on this premise that I've seen. Art is a good CGI, and the music is appropriately over-the-top dramatic. Rating: very good, relevant genres: drama, comedy, coming of age.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
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vol. 65 here
Ah, Sailor Moon, the gateway to the Magical Warrior Girl genre that a certain pony show might have taken inspiration from, yes indeed. (Seriously, Twilight Sparkle is basically "What if Sailor Mercury was the leader?"
In recent years, I remember rewatching the two seasons dubbed by DiC around the time the lockdown started, though when I say "rewatching" I'm not actually sure I ever saw them all the way through before. Most of what I know is because of Internet.
I wish I could remember where I read it, but apparently the creator of Sailor Moon (Naoko Takeuchi) was inspired to make Sailor Moon a bit of a "crybaby" after her concept was mocked by an executive in as many words. It would've been so easy to make the character perfect or just mildly "flawed", but nope: she really does got problems, and that just makes her heroic development all the more satisfying.
I should consider it hokey as hell, but for some reason I really like the reincarnation backstory. That said, it's also the only time the Tuxedo Mask romance gets any real attention, as future seasons increasingly phase him out (plus the next season has a plot point that makes him look kinda dumb).
Weirdly, Ami gets a romantic interest in a couple of episodes this season (or one this season and one next: I forget), who just up and vanishes thereafter. This despite arguably having better chemistry than Usagi and Endymion.
Some of those got weird. Like, I remember a hairdresser monster, and either a cake monster or a monster who attacked in a cake shop (or both).
I do like how the Sailor V merchandise acts as foreshadowing for Venus' debut, though I'm also disappointed that angle got (mostly) dropped almost immediately after said debut. Given how much of a fan Usagi is, you'd think that'd be a point of emphasis.
Gotta feel bad for Ami, though: much as they get some mileage out of her bubble fog attack, she doesn't even get any offensive capability till next season.
Man, I really wish DiC had been bold enough to stick the landing. I mean, technically these girls have all died once before, so you could use the reincarnation angle as a palliative if you absolutely could not make clear that they got killed off in the season finale.
The DiC dub added a bizarre line about the aliens knowing something from Queen Beryl; given who they turn out to be, though, it's virtually impossible to imagine them being on such speaking terms with the previous villain, and I have no idea why the dubbers suddenly injected this random bit of continuity.
Another recurring trend is the Sailor Senshi getting new powers... only in this arc, and then they were promptly forgotten about in the next one.
Oh God, that dub voice. That horrible, horrible dub voice!
Even discounting that, I really didn't like Chibiusa in the early going (her story gets more interesting later). I know I praised Usagi earlier for being a bit of a crybaby, but that was tame (and redeemed by other traits) compared to whatever the heck Chibiusa was up to here.
The other reason I didn't take to Chibiusa at all. That seemed needlessly creepy.
Ah, the Black Moon Clan. A definite upgrade in the antagonist department, especially given the time travel plot. Saphir was the most interesting, and the girls don't even get to fight him!
Well, mostly redeemable. I remember Rubeus being a nasty piece of work, given he manipulated the Specter Sisters and openly didn't care about them beyond the mission. Esmeraude didn't seem all that pitiable either, though she was more humanized by comparison.
Do like how Prince Diamond could be treated as a creepy foe, a not-completely-foolish pawn, and a well-intentioned loyalist to his clansmen at the same time. One of the more complicated antagonists.
Always good to have a multi-faction melee rather than the more typical good-versus-evil showing.
I think the word is "distinctive". Maybe it's just my biases, but I tend to think of the DiC voice cast for the Sailor Senshi as the classic ones, such as Terri Hawkes for Sailor Moon, Susan Roman for Sailor Jupiter, and Stephanie Morgenstern for Sailor Venus.
Luna's a crossed wire, though: in all other versions, she's supposed to be a younger, cuter ally, but the DiC dub has firmly stamped her in my mind as a prim and proper old lady.
Japan was just too far ahead of its time. Or the US was too far behind the times. Take your pick.
Genuinely curious if there was some symbolic theming for each mineral name, or if it was mostly random. The Black Moon Clan had a colour theme going on with Rubeus (red), Esmeraude (green), and Saphir (blue), but I don't think it was noticeable beyond that.
Especially inconsistent in the DiC dub too, namely when it came to the "moral of the story" bits at the end of each ep. Some of them just lazily left in material that had been cut from the episodes themselves.
I gotta admit I avoided that one after hearing it was a far blander and flavourless version (example: Sailor Mars in the original anime versus this one). The distinction reminds me of the difference between the diverse character development of the original Digimon Adventure versus the all-style-no-substance Digimon Adventure 2020.
That said, I hear Pretty Cure (or is it PreCure?) was pretty good at continuing the Magical Warrior Girl tradition.
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Ah yes, and some other characters (particularly Rei) constantly call her that. I have to admit, I think it does make her more authentic than the usual stiff-upper-lip type we usually get.
You mean you didn't think the Moonlight Knight (with highly enunciated t's) was the coolest thing ever?
All those people who had the rainbow crystals were special people who mostly never returned... but one or two did, which was a nice callback. But yeah, some of the better side characters just get tossed aside. *cough* Naru, to belabor the point a third time in this blog.
Dammit, I even forgot to say that the Dic/Cloverway dubs Anglicized everyone's names. Naru was Molly and had a thick New York accent.
That was strange. It's like the public completely forgot about her, too. And only so much public awareness of the group as a whole ever happened. Shingo fanboying over Sailor Moon was kinda cute, though.
Yeah, bubbles and fog do not great weapons make. I thought I for sure remembered her getting a cool attack called Mercury Ice Storm in S2 that she only ever used once, but that may have been something they changed for the Dic dub. When I rewatched it as the Viz dub recently, it wasn't there. Maybe I just made it up...
Damn was she annoying. The only time I genuinely liked her was when she got corrupted. Other than that, I appreciate the role she played with Hotaru in S3, though I still found her annoying.
True, they weren't exactly nice, but they were also being manipulated by Wiseman and otherwise would have done whatever Dimando said, and he was good in the end.
S1 was minerals that were always green or at least could be green. S2 was gems for the higher-ups, but the low-level gals didn't seem to have a pattern to what minerals were chosen. At that point, I think someone was just picking out ones they thought could be warped into names easily, though I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were all ones that could be found in a particular Japanese mine or something. Same for the S3 Witches 5. Whereas S1 had mineral names exactly, S2-3 tweaked most of them a bit, like Mimetite -> Mimete, though a few like Cyprine were still exact.
As the most, er, animated of the interpersonal relationships in the group, that's the one that stood out the most as being gutted, but the girls just feel like clones of the same generic person wearing different outfits. Finally in Cosmos Minako got some distinctive personality, but that's about it. Though I will say this: if there's one reason to watch Crystal, it's that the bad guys get a hell of a lot more sympathetic treatment and interesting back story. Take the S1 baddies, Zoisite, Malachite, Jadeite, and Nephrite. In the original, they're just... there (the really good romance arc between Nephrite and Naru notwithstanding). In Crystal you get to see their history in which they were Endymion's knights before Metalia corrupted them. Likewise, the Amazon Quartet in S4. They just kind of go away in the original. But in Crystal (the manga does this, too), their names had been corrupted as well. VesVes=Vesta, CereCere=Ceres, JunJun=Juno, and PallaPalla=Pallas, i.e., they were Sailor Warriors of the biggest asteroids, and Chibi Moon's personal guardians, who got corrupted by Nehelenia, but they return in Cosmos.
Oh jeez, there are so many of those -Cure series out there that I have zero idea whether various ones share a continuity or if they're all unrelated. I haven't watched any of them.
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Oh, and getting back to Ami’s attacks powering up in S3 and branching to the others, how badass was Sailor Pluto in S3? They made an incredibly heavy plot point with her that disappointingly never came back to roost. I mean… she stopped time and selectively left Uranus and Neptune free to move, and when they’re amazed and ask why she’d never done that before, she says it’s forbidden and she’d have dire consequences to face for it, then promptly disappears for the rest of the season. But the girls don’t really subsequently acknowledge her sacrifice, and when Pluto returns in S4, it’s like nothing happened. Maybe this is her from earlier in the timeline? She is a time traveler after all, and there’s an offhand comment at one point that for all she looks the same age as Uranus and Neptune, she may well be centuries, if not millennia, old. There were potentially some very strong plots to be made out of all that, but it just gets dropped.
My friends were all into Sailor Moon when I was in high school, but not me! That was...
*checks notes*
...girly shit? >_>;
Yeah, I really need to watch it one of these days. <_<;;
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I'm just wondering how a sane person would react if, in the middle of a war between magical factions, they suddenly started hearing a disembodied voice telling them to ditch their girlfriend or bad things would happen.
Seems to be a bit of a theme with plot developments in this series, though I think internally the third season was much better at consistency.
Huh, I thought it was New Jersey. That's one reason why I'd describe this particular dub as "distinctive" - for better or worse, at least Molly was memorably weird, VERY WEIRD.
It has unfortunate implications these days, given the age gap, but her helping Nephrite on the path to redemption at least made his arc one of the more involved and engaging ones and they even had the hardcore nerve to kill him off at the end of it right in front of her. 😧Although Zoisite was a delightfully evil scumbag while he/she lasted. 😈
Oh, the irony. The hilarious dramatic irony. 😉
Not just talking about Molly here - though her potentially becoming a secret-keeper for Sailor Moon would've been great - but again, I wish more had been done with the "muggle" cast like Usagi's family such as what would've happened if her brother found out who she really was. Maybe it was a sign of the times to just treat the "adoptive family" (even if, in this case, it was via reincarnation) as a placeholder before the otherworldly drama kicks in, but I can't help thinking they'd get more emphasis in a modern day equivalent.
Sailor Mars as a rival/big sister figure I am 100% in support of. Especially since she's really no less of a klutz. I also like how we got to see some of her life as a miko at her grandfather's Shinto temple.
I've watched a couple (two of them were adapted into two independent "Glitter Force" series on Netflix - your mileage may vary on how good the dubbing was), and I can confirm they're unrelated to each other. The first Glitter Force (in Japan: Smile PreCure) takes very obvious inspiration from Sailor Moon, to the point where you can tell which Inner Sailor Senshi specifically inspired which warrior girl within the Smile Pretty Cures/Glitter Force.
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Strictly speaking, not the first time a heroic sacrifice was quickly dismissed. The first season ended with the Sailor Senshi - having defeated Queen Beryl with a final attack - reincarnated and having all forgotten their past lives, a noble sacrifice which was quickly undone about two, three episodes later in the filler arc.
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I agree it would have been cool if Usagi had brought Naru on as a confidant. I appreciate that a similar thing happens in Miraculous Ladybug, though in that case it means Alya also being a part-time hero. At least there are a couple of instances, like the one of Ami’s love interests you mention, and a girl who liked Mamoru but then realized who Sailor Moon was and knew she couldn’t compete and lets it be a secret.
Another thing I liked about the reboot is that Sailor Mars’s two crows Phobos and Deimos were actual characters here and there. And it turns out they, the cats, and numerous other helpers are also Sailor Warriors from other planets and can take on human form. And yes, Artemis is still male as a Sailor Warrior. I’m pretty sure that’s all consistent with the manga.
Kind of a fridge moment, but consider that Usagi’s family might be brainwashed about her the same way they were for Chibi Usa. Just unlike her daughter, Usagi doesn’t know the truth of it herself since she arrived while still a baby. Yeah, it’s a different mechanism since the rest are explicitly said to be reincarnated while Chibi Usa time travels there, but it’s interesting to think about how, even as reincarnations, they may have been plunked into these families in a similar way. We meet so few family members of any that we can’t say whether or not there’s any resemblance, for example. Usagi looks nothing like Ikuko or… I forget Dad’s name. We do get to see Ami’s mom and Rei’s grandfather, and I don’t recall ever seeing more. Ami is the only one of those who might have a resemblance.
There’s even a toddler named Chibi Chibi who turns up in S5, and the family, except Usagi, are convinced she’s their third child. FWIW, the original leaves it vague who she actually is, while the reboot does show you her origin.
Oh crap, and remember the pen Usagi had in S1 that let her create disguises? And how often that would have come in useful in later seasons but for some reason she didn’t have it anymore?
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I need to learn not to hit Post until I’m actually done typing.
I agree, Rei had some of the more interesting dynamics. Particularly that she could combine her shrine maiden abilities with her powers. I love when heroes can draw on some outside abilities they already had independent of their powers to complement them, similar to Makoto being good at hand-to-hand combat. But seriously, Rei, how do you fight in high heels?
Thanks for this breakdown. Sailor Moon is something I've been meaning to watch and now I have a handy guide.
I can't say for certain the first anime I ever saw, but Sailor Moon is in the first three (others being Dragonball and Speed Racer). I don't really remember much about it, because I never saw more than a handful of episodes, and that was
twentythirty!? years ago. I recall the main girl's name had been anglicized to Serena and the guy was Dario, that's about it.drive.google.com/uc?id=1iGbETkXPVvOqg9-ylZF38K1h5AXsETlV
Man, also forgot to talk about how fun it is that the girls, in their regular forms, constantly had different outfits on. I love when a show pays attention to detail like that. I went back and edited it in.
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It was a fun show with surprising depth in places, and I think it’s aged well. Happy watching to you!
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I just imagine you doing the Rodney Dangerfield bulging eyes and collar-tugging as you say that…
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Yeah, I guess especially at the time, American children wouldn’t have really even heard many Japanese names before, so Dic/Cloverway changed everyone to be more accessible. The main cast was:
Usagi (Moon) -> Serena
Ami (Mercury) -> Amy
Rei (Mars) -> same pronunciation, but I think they spelled it Raye
Minako (Venus) -> Mina
Makoto (Jupiter) -> Lita
Mamoru (Tuxedo Mask) -> Darien
Haruka (Uranus) -> Amara
Michiru (Neptune) -> Michelle
Setsuna (Pluto) -> Trista
Oddly enough, they left Hotaru (Saturn) alone. And they left the family names intact too.
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I get no respect! :V
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y.yarn.co/3696bea4-8dae-4a52-bd32-e11175e1a542_text.gif
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Can confirm:
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Wait, you mean like the parents were reincarnated too, or that there's some general amnesiac spell around the Sailors? Because my interpretation is generally that they're biological parents to Usagi; it's just that her spirit came from her past life, and like her homeland was reduced to Square One and has to start again from scratch. Apart from the victims of those rainbow jewel monsters, I don't recall any other relatives displaying magical powers. Also, I think the Senshi still had to be wary about revealing their identities to anyone else, otherwise the hypothetical amnesiac spell would just take care of it for them.
I might be misunderstanding something, but that's how it seems to me.
I thought that happened in the original anime too? In one of the later seasons, I guess (I'm not as familiar with the post-Sailor Moon S continuity).
I can't make up my mind if that's an OP early item (because if you could disguise yourself as anyone changeling-like...) or a lame wardrobe-shift gimmick that was rapidly rendered redundant by the need to brute force battles. The disguise pen seems to have limited utility in a warrior series, and given the decade, I wonder if there might have been a toyetic motive with the seasonal power upgrades (I think Usagi's wand changed form a few times?).
That moment when you realize you've been learning Japanese culture mostly from anime...
Example: what an ofuda is.
I do love it, though. Especially yes, how their powers and their personal traits bleed over (Ami being the more strategic and versatile thinker to go along with her changing water motif, for instance).
By lifting your knees high... and kicking ass. 🔥
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It's certainly possible that Princess Serenity was reincarnated into a body that really was the biological daughter of her present-day parents. But I also entertain the possibility that she's not biologically theirs, and whatever effect convinced them that Chibiusa and Chibi Chibi were part of the family did the same for Usagi. Only when it happened to those other two, they were old enough to have other memories and know the truth. If Usagi showed up as an infant, she might not. Just food for thought.
There was an episode where Luna made a wish to be human, and she spent a day as one. But she was never a Sailor Warrior in the original. At the end Cosmos, they turn human, as do the crows, so you have Sailor Luna, Sailor Artemis, Sailor Diana, Sailor Phobos, Sailor Deimos, and a ton of others.
On Makoto's finer points... I was really surprised this didn't get censored from the Dic dub. In S1, when all the girls were still lusting after Mamoru, they were all auditioning for a play (I forget which, Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Sleeping Beauty) in which the lead would get to kiss him. Mako argued that she should get the role because she had the biggest boobs.