#sailormoonredraw is trending and prompting artists to make a lot of great Sailor Moon fan art

Sailor Moon fans on Twitter may have noticed a trending hashtag over the past few days as #sailormoonredraw has been getting a ton of attention. When I spotted it earlier today it said that there were a whopping 530,000 Tweets about the topic! So what’s this all about? Most of the popular and recent results for the hash tag redraw this image:

Sailor Moon S episode 125 - #sailormoonredraw

The original screenshot from Sailor Moon S episode 125

It’s from Sailor Moon S episode 125. While this is the third last episode of Sailor Moon S it’s the last one in the main story as the other two which follow it are sort of terrible. This scene has Sailor Moon facing off against Mistress 9. It seems likely that this image was originally chosen for the intense expression on Sailor Moon’s face. Why it trended could be due to a number of factors but it being a close up of the main character’s face could be a contributing factor. I saw a lot of posts from English speaking people over the past couple of days and going back to three or four days it seems to have trended mostly in Japan.

Thought I can’t tell when exactly this particular image was first used for a redraw I can find instances of it going back to 2019, though it only seems to have started really going viral of the past few days. The trend of redrawing Sailor Moon, or other characters, has been going on for a while as there have been many other Sailor Moon images redrawn by a number of people over the years.

I’ve included a selection of redraws in this post. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of the best as there are too many fine examples to count. I suggest everyone click on the hashtag #sailormoonredraw and check out some of those for yourself! New art has been rolling in all day and I don’t expect this to stop any time soon! Which ones are your favourites? Be sure to leave a comment or tag the Sailor Moon News Twitter account to let us know. Have any of you done a redraw yourselves? If so we’d love to hear about it!

Watch a short clip of Naoko Takeuchi mentioning that Super Sentai shows inspired her as a child

Naoko Takeuchi with the Zyurangers

Yesterday I found this photo of Naoko Takeuchi, the creator of Sailor Moon, with the Zyurangers, from the Super Sentai series which was adapted as the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series in North America. The photo was posted to Twitter by Tuxedo Unmasked, who runs a great web site by the same name. He later shared a link to the source video, which was a 20th Anniversary video of TOEI’s Sentai Series which aired on March 21st 1995. I can’t embed the video but you can watch the video on YouTube to see the brief appearance by Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi at 16 minutes and 57 seconds. This interview lasts less than 30 seconds.

Naoko Takeuchi discusses Super Sentai series

Why is Naoko Takeuchi, who created Sailor Moon, wrote and drew the Sailor Moon manga, and provided work for various incarnations of the Sailor Moon series, appearing in a show about Super Sentai? As she mentions in this brief clip, she was inspired by Super Sentai series as a child. This special from 1995, which commemorates 20 years of Super Sentai series for TOEI, demonstrates that such series had been around a long time before Sailor Moon. It is often said that Sailor Moon, a series in which many girls transform into coloured uniforms and use attacks to defeat monsters, is a kind of Super Sentai type story about and for girls. This clip confirms that such series were a partial inspiration for the Sailor Moon manga and ultimately the anime and live action series as well.

Sailor Moon

I’ve certainly mentioned this similarity many times in the context of the live action series. The Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon series is a Tokusatsu (live action special effects) series much like Super Sentai series are. As Sailor Moon is a manga version of a Super Sentai series the live action version is a way of the franchise evolving into something even more similar to the shows which inspired it. The few recycled sets and even costumes are not proof of that, so much as the general similarities in the basic plots of these series.

Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Act 18 - The Sailor Guardians with Sailor Venus in the middle

Although Naoko Takeuchi likely drew at least partial inspiration from Super Sentai series, it’s not possible for her to actually have been inspired by Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, which was later adapted in North America as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. That series first aired in February of 1992. The Codename: Sailor V manga started in August of 1991 and Sailor Moon, which has more similarities to a Super Sentai team show, was first published in December of 1991. The Sailor Moon anime series began airing in March of 1992, so it’s certainly easy to compare Sailor Moon to Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, because they were both on television at the same time, but without a time machine it’s impossible for either to have been an inspiration for the other.

Kimberly the Pink Power Ranger

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers didn’t start airing until August of 1993 which was still two years before Sailor Moon started airing on TV in the US and Canada in August of 1995. Though Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was adapted from three different Super Sentai series, they kept the Zyuranger outfits for all three of those seasons, so North American fans would mostly only be familiar with those costumes when Sailor Moon’s first 65 episodes played on TV until Power Rangers Zero started in April of 1996 after which the costumes for each series continued to change.

Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger episode 5 - Red Ranger

Source: Tuxedo Unmasked on Twitter

Check out KILLY’s music video for “Sailor Moon”

Sailor Moon - KILLY

Canadian hip-hop artist KILLY”s latest music video is for a song called Sailor Moon! You can check out the video below.

Check out this link to buy or listen to the song on various streaming services and stores. So what does this song have to do with Sailor Moon? Well it seems that KILLY’s “bad bitch” leans on him like Sailor Moon! The song mentions SRT though I don’t imagine this a reference to .srt files, the SubRip Subtitle files sometimes used for downloaded fan subbed versions of anime such as Sailor Moon! The song isn’t exactly full of references to the show, but it is in fact called Sailor Moon and KILLY does appear to have a fondness for the character!

When asked about his interest in Sailor Moon in an interview with Complex KILLY he said that he wasn’t a huge fan but that he used to watch it when it came on TV while he was a kid. KILLY was born in Toronto and moved to Victoria, BC when he was 8. As a fellow Canadian I know that Sailor Moon played quite a bit on TV here especially back when it was first airing starting in 1995 which means most Canadians who were young at the time are at least somewhat familiar with the show, but KILLY was born in 1997 so he may have seen the show when Sailor Moon S or SuperS aired in Canada years later.

Follow KILLY on Twitter or Instagram for more.

What do you think of the song?