A special set including all three of the Sailor Moon films is coming to Blu-ray on February 11th for with an MSRP of $29.98. A listing on the Crunchyroll store shows us the box art featuring the Sailor Moon R Movie poster. The set will include the three films Sailor Moon R The Movie, Sailor Moon S The Movie and Sailor Moon SuperS: The Nine Sailor Guardians Unite! Miracle of the Black Dream Hole. Is this release actually 4:3 full screen?
All three films had been previously released on Blu-ray as individual releases in 2018. These were high quality releases which were a high definition transfer from film source, like the same one used for the theatrical exhibitions of the film which took place in North America in 2017. It isn’t clear at this point if this release will be those same disks packaged together or if it will be a new version. While the newer releases of the TV series on Blu-ray were from new higher quality video sources, this same thing isn’t necessary for these films as they weren’t upscaled from standard definition video like the TV series is. Both the original and new releases will include the new English dubbed version from Viz and a Japanese version with English subtitles.
Oddly enough the box art shown in the Crunchyroll store shows the aspect ratio of the films is 4:3. Could this be accurate? The Sailor Moon films were indeed animated in a “Full Screen” 4:3 open matte format however the matted widescreen 16:9 version is what was shown in theatres, on LaserDisc and on the Japanese DVD and Blu-ray releases. While the recent Blu-ray versions of the films released in North America in 2018 were indeed 16:9 widescreen, the VHS and DVD versions released in the 1990s were 4:3. This paradoxically meant that the lower quality North American versions of the film included more of the image than the Japanese releases which were meant to duplicate the Japanese theatrical experience, as you can see from the screenshots included in this post which are from the old DVDs. It would certainly be an odd choice to have these releases be full frame in 2024, as this would require getting new masters from the film source separate from those used in the Japanese release.
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The features shown include the Make Up! Sailor Guardians and Ami’s First Love featurettes which I’ve never seen full screen before, though I believe it’s possible that the Japanese VHS releases would have been 4:3. These days the term full screen is a bit of a misnomer as most modern TVs and displays are 16:9 or some sort of widescreen resolution, unlike the many 4:3 CRT displays people had in the 1990s.
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Do you plan on picking up this set, or did you already buy these movies years ago? I would certainly buy them again if these were indeed 4:3 versions, but I suspect this may be an error on the packaging. Since the original releases of the Sailor Moon R, S and SuperS films had special features which aren’t mentioned on this box art, that could indicate that there are new discs and might in fact be 4:3 full screen. What do you think?
