To celebrate Valentine’s Day this past February 14th, fansubbing group Miss Dream have release a “Definitive Collection” of the 2003 live action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon series. This is not an official release but rather a fan subbed version of the show. I will always encourage readers to support the official release when possible so please, do your best to buy all of the live action Sailor Moon official releases.

Well yeah I’m not seeing them either but I did happily buy the DVD releases that were out when the show first aired and continue to hope that we will be seeing an official release of this show at some point!

So what is this release and what makes it “Definitive”? Well it includes the entire show, upscaled by C’est la vie remasters, as well as a ton of extra features. The DVDs of the series has a lot of behind the scenes interviews which are all here as well as stage performances, commercials and other promotions. There’s just a ridiculous amount of content here for fans of the series.

How about that upscaling? It’s worth considering that the live action series, often call PGSM by fans, was shot in standard definition interlaced video. This means there is no high definition source. There isn’t even a progressive scan version of this that existed before it was interlaced. It’s shot in 480i, so there’s a field every 60th of a second, so that if you step through the show one frame at a time, there will be interlacing artifacts in every frame where there’s motion. Makes it tricky to get screenshots! There has been software used to deinterlace and upscale the standard definition DVD video source to high definition. I’m always saying that with upscales, like those we’ve seen for the Blu-ray releases of the 90s Sailor Moon anime, you can’t get something from nothing. This is mostly true, but with AI upscaling technology we are able to get a pretty nice picture from a lower resolution source. Miss Dream staff member ThatNerdDave who worked on this release has mentioned that this work was done using Handbrake, Hybrid, Topaz Video, and Adobe Premiere Pro. Is this a better way to watch the series than previous downloads you’ve seen? Probably. I’m always happy to have my DVDs, but this is a nice option too. Have a look at a comparison of the upscaled version and DVD version below.

Miss Dream HD Upscaled version

DVD version

It’s also just nice to see all of these extras. There is obviously just a lot of love that has gone into this release, which is why it’s being dubbed a “Love Letter to Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon”. I’ve long been a fan of this series. I enjoyed watching it in 2003-2004 and have enjoyed it whenever I revisit it over the years. If you’ve seen it before or if this is your first time watching, I hope you enjoy this fantastic series.

Source: Miss Dream