Sailor Cosmos has been cast in the upcoming Sailor Moon Le Mouvement Final musical and she will be played by none other than Satomi Okubo, the actress who played Sailor Moon before Hotaru Nomoto took over the role. Satomi Okubo was Sailor Moon in the La Reconquista, Petite Étrangère and Amour Eternal musicals. This is such an interesting casting choice when considering the actual identity of Sailor Cosmos. Spoilers below for those who may not have read the manga!

Sailor Cosmos is basically Sailor Moon from the very distant future. This is way beyond when she was Neo Queen Serenity. There is some disagreement amongst the fan community about what exactly this means. Is Sailor Cosmos just a really old but still alive version of the Sailor Moon we see in the series or is she a reincarnated version, much like Princess Serenity from Silver Millennium is the Sailor Moon we know? Alternatively some fans think of her more like a descendant of Chibiusa, which isn’t really an interpretation I can get behind. It seems like Sailor Cosmos once was Sailor Moon which is what makes this casting so brilliant. Here is a great way to have a slightly older version of Sailor Moon that looks totally familiar. With there being less than two years between the ages of the two actresses the difference isn’t all that drastic, but it’s a nice touch.

This reminds me of a few other instances in fiction where a similar interaction with a prior actor occur. The most similar comparison to me is the 2009 Star Trek movie which included a completely new cast but included interactions between the new Spock, Zachary Quinto, and older time traveling Spock played by the original actor Leonard Nimoy. In this case everything down to the time travel similarity is in place. The X-Men film franchise did something similar as the Days of Future Past film from 2014 included new cast members James MacAvoy and Michael Fassbender as Professor X and Magneto acting alongside their original series future counterparts of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.

There are a few other not totally similar examples. John Wesley Shipp played the Flash in a 1990 TV series and returned to play the father of the Flash in the 2014 Flash TV series. His name changed but it was an interesting juxtaposition. Batman The Animated Series did similar things a few times. The Grey Ghost was a Batman like character from Bruce Wayne’s childhood who was played by Adam West who had played Batman in the 1966 series. In the 1999 series Batman Beyond Bruce Wayne was portrayed by Kevin Conroy who voiced him in the 1992 animated series. In this case the new Batman was Terry McGinnis, a completely new character, so it’s not really the same thing. Doctor Who is all about changing his face and time traveling so this has happened in the series more times than I would attempt to count.

All we need now is a movie in which Thomas Dekker and Edward Furlong meet! Can you think of any other examples in which an actor previously portraying the role met with a new actor?

Source: Sailor Moon Official Site

A number of similarities occur between a recent episode of Doctor Who and a story arc in Sailor Moon Sailor Stars! More specifically both stories revolve around obsessions with gazing at mirrors which actually house some sort of monster by people with a yellow reflecting star in one eye. The episode of Doctor Who in question is the season premiere of season 10, The Pilot, which aired this past weekend. In this episode a character, Heather, has a defect in her eye which causes it to have a yellow shine in it. The Doctor’s new companion Bill refers to it as a star and the episode’s original title was “A Star In Her Eye”. In the episode Heather is obsessed with staring at her reflection in a puddle as she gazes at it and invites Bill to do so too. Ultimately the reflection is actually an alien which sucks her into the mirror and then attacks others through reflections. Sound familiar?

I was struck by a surprising similarity to a few episodes of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. In the first 6 episodes of this season, with the similarities more specifically being during episodes 167 through 169, there was a brief story arc where Mamoru got a shooting star in his eye which was actually a piece of mirror from space. This caused him, and a number of other people, to become obsessed with mirrors gazing at them day and night. The bit of star in their eye caused a yellow shimmer which looks just like that seen in Heather’s eye in Doctor Who. Ultimately Nehelenia was in the mirror, as the shooting star was actually a bit of the Mirror of Dreams which had been confining her and the reflection pulls Mamoru in just like we’d seen in Doctor Who.

Coincidence? I like to joke about these similarities being intended but I’m not convinced anything more than coincidence is really necessary at this point given the countless hours of TV produced every week. It is possible that Steven Moffat, who wrote the episode, had seen the episodes of Sailor Moon in which this took place and used it more for a visual inspiration. The specific story details beyond the superficial don’t really add up.

Looking for more of a Doctor Who/Sailor Moon link? Sailor Iron Mouse, also appearing in Sailor Stars, travels around in a phone booth. Doctor Who travels around in a TARDIS which is disguised as a Police Box which is a specialized kind of phone booth/panic room that a person can use to call the police. This is similar to Bill and Ted’s phone booth which was itself likely inspired by Doctor Who. Whether Sailor Iron Mouse’s phone booth was directly inspired by the TARDIS or through the intermediate of Bill and Ted’s phone booth isn’t something I can definitively determine. Regardless it’s nice to see Doctor Who finally has a Bill in their phone booth. Let’s get a Ted in there too!