August 3rd is Mamoru Chiba’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than to have our first look at Tuxedo Mask’s character designs for the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal films? What do you think? He’s got the Tuxedo and the Mask. No top hat but that isn’t that odd as he’s often not wearing his hat in the manga and Sailor Moon Crystal. He’s got little dots in his hair but I’ll assume this won’t be something we will be seeing in the actual film.
The first of the Sailor Moon Eternal films will be released on January 8th and will feature the first half of the Dream story arc of the Sailor Moon manga. Mamoru features prominently in this story arc so we should see a fair amount of this design in these films.
We’ve now seen pretty much everyone except for every single villain. With January fast approaching one would hope we’ll get to see some of the Dead Moon Circus, starting with the Amazon Trio and Zirconia, some time soon!
Great news for fans who use the Funimation streaming service to watch anime. Sailor Moon R The Movie will be added to that service on August 7th. The dubbed and subbed versions of the film will be available to watch for free with ads or, for those who have signed up for the pay version of the service, without ads.
The movie is currently available to stream on Crunchyroll which also has the option of watching the film for free with ads or without ads with a paid subscription. There’s no indication at this time as to if or when Sailor Moon S The Movie or Sailor Moon SuperS The Movie (The Nine Sailor Guardians Unite! Miracle of the Black Dream Hole) would be added to either service. The original Sailor Moon anime series is not on either of these services but American fans can stream it for free on Viz’s web site or with a paid Hulu subscription while Canadians can stream it on TubiTV.
Sailor Moon R The Movie is my favourite of the Sailor Moon films and it’s always a joy to watch. If you haven’t seen it in a while this would be a nice time to watch it!
In a collaboration which would have surprised me a decade ago but doesn’t phase me in the least these days pain killer brand Bufferin has teamed up with Sailor Moon Eternal for their latest campaign. Art from this features our first look at the designs for Sailor Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Saturn from the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal films. What do you think of their new look? This seems to be a lazy placement of the characters with Sailor Neptune’s hand clearly positioned to be holding Sailor Uranus’s but the two’s hands never quite seem to overlap.
Bufferin is a brand of aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, which used to be available here in Canada but which isn’t sold here anymore. The brand still seems fairly common in the US and in Japan. I don’t take aspirin due to some conflicting health issues I have, so be sure to consult your doctor or pharmacist if you aren’t sure what pain killers might be appropriate for you. The campaign will feature Sailor Moon characters on product packages. Thanks to commenter nonameq9 who shared one of these images in the comments.
The Bufferin site has now been updated with a Sailor Moon section which shows the updated art as well as ads featuring Kotono Mitsuishi, the voice of Sailor Moon. There’s also a quiz which fans can complete for a chance to win either a Luna cushion or Super Sailor Moon Room Wear. Certain screens on that quiz can give a higher resolution view of some of the characters which I’ve included in this post.
The first of the Sailor Moon Eternal films will be in theatres on January 8th and will tell the first half of the Dream story arc from the Sailor Moon manga. We previously saw the civilian forms of Haruka, Michiru, Setsuna and Hotaru in an ad for Ichiban Kuji. There is some other art of them in their civilian forms in a recent ad campaign for J!NS glasses.
It isn’t clear how much involvement these character would have in the first film as they are mostly absent from the early half of this story arc of the manga. My own expectation is that the film will end with a short appearance of Michiru Mama, Haruka Papa, Setsuna Mama and the younger version of Hotaru who was a baby when we last saw her at the end of the Infinity arc. What do you think?
This afternoon, July 25th 2020, at 3pm Pacific Time (6pm Eastern Time) fans will be able to watch a virtual Sailor Moon Panel, Sailor Moon: The Power of Female Friendship, live on YouTube. This is part of San-Diego Comic-Con’s virtual convention which is being held this year instead of a live convention which would be impossible due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The panel will be hosted by comic book historian Jessica Tseang and includes voice actors from Viz’s new dub of Sailor Moon including Michelle Ruff, the voice of Luna, Kate Higgins, the voice of Sailor Mercury, Amanda Celine Miller, the voice of Sailor Jupiter, as well as comic book writer Sam Maggs, and comedian Chris Bryant.
To view the panel head over the Comic-Con site or watch it directly on YouTube (the video will likely be unavailable until shortly before the event starts). It seems like other panels remain available after the original live broadcast so fans who aren’t able to watch the panel live or are seeing this post too late should still be okay to watch it.
Will you be checking out the panel? For those reading this in the future, did you watch the panel and what did you think?
Today, June 30th, is Usagi’s birthday! To celebrate a special video has been released on the official Sailor Moon site which includes a bunch of junk no one cares about and a clip from the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal movie! The clip shows Super Sailor Moon and Super Sailor Chibi Moon’s transformation sequence. You can watch the clip by viewing the embedded YouTube video below. I’ve cued it up to 2 minutes and 44 seconds when the footage starts.
What can I saw about this footage? It is obviously nearly identical to the transformation from Sailor Moon SuperS. Surely the Sailor Moon Eternal film, like Sailor Moon SuperS, is based on the Dream arc of the Sailor Moon manga so we should expect there to be some similarities but this is next level. Every turn and pose is replicated in this footage. The designs are updated but these are the movements we have already seen. Not convinced? Check out this side by side comparison!
The rest of the footage is just a slideshow of products which I suppose fans may find mildly interesting!
Sailor Moon Eternal Part 1 will be out in theatres in Japan starting January 8th. The second part will be out the next month on February 11th. We don’t yet have any details about an international release of the film.
Can you ever have enough copies of the Sailor Moon manga? Of course not! The latest iteration is a fully colourized version which will be available only as a digital download. After being spotted in a magazine it has now been officially announced on the official Sailor Moon web site. The good news is that the first two volumes will be released in a couple of days, on June 29th! The bad news is there is no current plan for a physical release of this version of the manga. It remains to be seen if we will be getting a printed version eventually.
The price of this version if fairly low at only 990 yen per volume. This works out to about $9.25 US. It isn’t clear if or when it might be released internationally. The big advantage of the digital versions which were released last year was that they were released in a number of languages and stores worldwide. While I certainly hope that’s eventually the case with this version, I’m not seeing them for sale in any particular stores outside of Japan at this time.
So what’s going on with this version? Sailor Moon was originally a black and white manga and this version has colour added. The original release of the Sailor Moon manga in the magazine Nakayoshi had a few colour pages at the start of each chapter. These were not included in all manga releases though all colour pages were in the latest release, the Eternal Edition of the manga. Oddly these colour pages are actually recoloured differently for this new version of the manga and while it isn’t clear why this is I suspect the aim was to have a consistent look throughout the new version which may not have worked seamlessly if the original colour pages were used.
It’s also worth noting that this colour version is not the same as the ones seen in the 20th Anniversary art exhibit a few years back. Check out this comparison on Twitter which shows slight differences.
Will you be checking out this release? Will you buy the Japanese version or hold out for an English release or perhaps a physical printed edition?
An announcement posted on the Sailor Moon Official Site has mentioned that the release of the upcoming Sailor Moon Eternal film has been delayed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sailor Moon Eternal Part 1 was originally scheduled to be released in theatres in Japan starting on September 11th 2020 but this release date has now been pushed back to January 8th 2021. In addition to this we also now have a release date for Part 2 of the film, which will be released on February 11th 2021.
We currently have no indication of how or when the film will be released outside of Japan. September 11th was less than three months away when this delay was announced, but we had gotten no news about a simultaneous international release. Were this something which had been planned, I suspect we may have gotten some news about it by now.
Sailor Moon Eternal Part 1 will cover the first half of the Dream Arc of the Sailor Moon manga. Part 2 will cover the second half. We hadn’t gotten much in the way of details about the second film but with the movie’s release coming up so quickly after the first film, it seems likely that we might get some details about it soon.
I hope none of you had any plans to be in Japan by September of this year! It seems a bit early to be travelling due to the ongoing pandemic. Hopefully the situation will have improved enough by January that some of you are able to travel to see the film and that fans in Japan are able to make it to theatres in safety. While theatres have started to gradually start opening up in Japan and around the world recently, this still presents a risk and movie goers are taking many precautions while attending screenings.
Back in the 1990s Sailor Moon was dubbed into English by DiC and later seasons were dubbed by Cloverway. Recently the series was dubbed into English again by Viz Media. As it turns out there was actually a total other English dub made by Speedy Video! Though information about this has been around in the fan community for a while, I had never heard about it until just a few days ago when I saw @CCTakato posting about it on Twitter. The dub was done by a company named Speedy Video which is based in Malaysia. It does not appear that any of the actors are actually native English speakers but rather that they speak English as second language. This means that the quality of the dub is, in a word, terrible. Speedy Video is well known in the Dragonball Z fan community for the terrible dub of that show which they made..
Though it’s hard to tell exactly what was dubbed by Speedy Video all of the episodes and clips I found were from Sailor Moon R which suggests this might be all they did. Some episodes which fans have tracked down were on VCDs. The VCD format was not as popular in North America as it was in parts of Asia. It is basically a video format somewhat like DVD only with a lower quality to accommodate smaller files which would fit on a CD rather than a DVD. Due to the data capacity of a VCD this means only two or three episodes will fit on a standard CD at a low resolution of 352×240 pixels using MPEG-1 video compression. DVDs by contrast are 720×480 using MPEG-2. A way to think of the standard is that VCD is to DVD as DVD is to Blu-Ray. Why do I know so much about VCDs? Many years before starting Sailor Moon News I did a few fan subbed episodes of Sailor Moon in VCD format. Though the format is popular with pirated movies there were a lot of legitimate VCDs releases over the years. I have one Cantonese Sailor Moon VCD and the entire Dragonflyz series which was never released on DVD.
Aside from a few clips which are available on YouTube episodes 47 and 48 of Sailor Moon R, the first two episodes featuring Ail and An, Yvan and Yvonne, can be found in their entirety. From these episodes we can get a decent idea of how faithful the dub is. Due to the poor sound quality and accents it was hard for me to make out everything so apologies if I’ve misheard anything. Some names are kept while others are changed. Most of the Sailor Guardians have their original names yet Minako is now named Ari Meriko which is very Japanese sounding for something that isn’t her original Japanese name. Ail and An, as mentioned, are Yvan and Yvonne Galaxy. They do not change those names from their civilian to alien identities so it’s a bit surprising that no one catches on that the new transfer students are the bad guys. Naru is called Suzie. Mamoru is think is called Mamoun Chiba but it’s hard to make out what’s being said. Luna and Artemis keep their names.
The Cardians are called Card Devils and monsters are generally referred to as Devils. Some of the common lines are a bit odd like “I will represent the Moon to punish you”. Moon Tiara Action is called Moon Crown Attack. On the episodes I saw episode 47 had no lyrics for the opening and ending theme but then episode 48 had the original Japanese songs for both. These were modified a bit though. The TV length versions were not used but instead the full length versions of the songs were used and awkwardly edited to fit in the short opening animation.
Check out this clip from Sailor Moon R episode 59, True Love Awakens: The Makai Tree’s Secret.
If you’re looking to check out the full episode 47 and 48 dubs I won’t link to them directly though you may be interested to check out the Lost Media Wiki’s page on the subject and if you do some good things may be found on that page. You can check out a number of clips from those episodes embedded below.
Worth mentioning is that one of the title screens on the VCD show that it was released by TVBI in 1997. Is that simply the date of the VCD release or the actual dub of the show? Since Sailor Moon R was released starting in 1993 in Japan and only a couple of years later in North America, this would be pretty late for a dub of the show to be made. For reference Sailor Moon Sailor Stars ended in February of 1997!
I suppose at the end of the day we should be thankful for the DiC dub we got with its various edits, skipped episodes, gender bends and course the terrible erasure of a number of LGBT characters because the alternative it seems could have been, in many ways, worse. The Speedy Video dub of Sailor Moon was not a North American product and not likely intended to be seen here. I can’t imagine a world where this would have been seen on TV in the US or Canada, and that’s probably for the best. If a more faithful dub is what you’re looking for, then the Viz dub is for you. I’ll always have nostalgia for that DiC dub which first introduced me to the series. My condolences for anyone who’s first exposure to the series was the Speedy Video dub. Would such a person ever be able to develop a lasting love of the show?
Above we see Usagi who was happy to have her memory erased but is upset to have it restored because those memories include having seen the Speedy Video dub of Sailor Moon!
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
