A two day concert, Akiko Kosaka 45th Anniversary Sailor Moon Music History Supported by Pretty Guardians, is coming to Tokyo November 9th and 10th

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Adam

A two day concert named “Akiko Kosaka’s 45th Anniversary Sailor Moon Music History Supported by Pretty Guardians” will be taking place in Tokyo on November 9th and 10th. This two days concert will actually include two different performances with completely different artists on each day. November 9th will be a relaxed piano concert with some conversations and the 10th will have a band performance. So what exactly is this? Akiko Kosaka is well known for having written many songs for the original Sailor Moon anime as well as Sailor Moon Crystal but in this case it is likely her involvement writing many songs for the Sailor Moon musicals which is the basis for this concert. We can tell from the other artists appearing at this event that this will almost certainly involve performances of a number of Sailor Moon musical songs as this will involve performers from the musicals. Across the two days actresses who portrayed almost all of the Sailor Guardians in the musicals, that being everyone but Sailor Pluto, as well as others will be performing. Sailor Pluto is likely only absent because Yuuko Hosaka, who originally played Sailor Pluto in some musicals, was originally scheduled to be involved with the event but had to cancel.

With this year’s Sailor Moon musical being delayed until 2020 this concert may serve as a nice alternative for some fans. I can only speculate as to the specific format but with there being performers to represent each characters with no duplicates it seems likely that some effort to have someone take the part of the Sailor Guardian they previously portrayed is likely. Will they wear some sort of costume or just sing some classic songs? Who knows! Here’s a breakdown of who’s going to be involved and when.

Not everyone is going to be involved with both days, but here’s a list of the actors which are going to be there for both November 9th and 10th. Akiko Kosaka, who’s career is being celebrated with this concert, will evidently be there for both days. Anza, the first actress to play Sailor Moon in a musical from 1993 to 1998, will likely be performing as Sailor Moon. Hisano Akamine, the third actress to play Sailor Mercury from 1999 to 2000, will likely be performing as Sailor Mercury. Misako Kotani, the second actress to play Sailor Mars from 1994 to 1997, will likely be performing as Sailor Mars. Emi Kuriyama, the seventh actress to play Sailor Jupiter from 1999 to 2000, will likely be performing as Sailor Jupiter. Akiko Miyazawa, the fourth actress to play Sailor Venus also played Queen Beryl and musical exclusive characters Bilhah Emerald and Elizabeth Bathory, a vampire. She will likely be performing as Sailor Venus. Sanae Kimura, the first actress to play Sailor Uranus from 1994 to 1997, will likely be performing as Sailor Uranus.

Yuuta Mochizuki, the second actor to play Tuxedo Mask, also played Kunzite in the very first musical and later the musical exclusive character Count Dracul. He is also well known for playing the Red Power Ranger in Zyuurangers, the series which was adapted in North America as the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. He will likely be performing as Tuxedo Mask. Hikari Ono has played Hawk’s Eye, Sailor Star Maker, Loof Merrow, a musical exclusive pirate, Bloody Dracul Vampir, a musical exclusive vampire who is Dracula’s daughter, and Prince Demande. It isn’t clear who she would be portraying in this concert as there doesn’t seem to be an actress to represent each of the Sailor Starlights.

The only person who will only be at the first day performance is Sakoto Yoshioka who played Princess Kakyuu in a musical in 1997. While it’s possible that she could be reprising her role as Princess Kakyuu, there is currently only one Sailor Starlight scheduled to be present on the first day so it doesn’t really add up.

There are a more performers who will only be there on the second day. This is when the full cast was originally planned to be together all at once. Yuuka Asami, the sixth actress to play Sailor Neptune from 1999 to 2002, later returned to play Jadeite in 2003. She will likely be performing as Sailor Neptune. Mao Mita, the fourth actress to play Sailor Saturn from 1999 to 2000, will likely be performing as Sailor Saturn. Tamaki Dia Shirai, the third actress to play Chibiusa from 1995 to 1996, will likely be performing as Sailor Chibi Moon. Ryuuji Kasahara played a number of characters including Kunzite, Death Ra, a musical exclusive member of the Death Busters, Tiger’s Eye, MC Fly, a musical exclusive minion of Galaxia, Chaos, Professor Tomoe, Baron Gilles de Rais, a musical exclusive vampire, and Dark Nibiru, a musical exclusive character. It’s not clear who he will be portraying. Momoko Okuyama, the first actress to play Sailor Star Healer in musicals from 1996 to 1998, may be reprising her role but once again as there is no Sailor Star Fighter actress involved we can’t be sure what role she will be playing.

With this event only taking place on a single day it may prove more difficult to get tickets than other musicals. Do any of you hope to be able to make it to this concert? I’m certainly hoping a CD or video release will be made available for fans who aren’t likely to attend.

Source: Sailor Moon official site Original Story with an Update.

Sailor Moon Monopoly game review

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Adam

The Sailor Moon Monopoly game is now out in stores and online. I got my copy from an EB Games store in Ottawa (the Canadian equivalent to GameStop) a while back and it seems like many fans have done the same. With the game in hand we can get a good look at exactly what’s going on with the various pieces! As we’d discussed earlier this seems to be Sailor Moon S the game for reasons which I can’t really fathom. The various characters are mostly all from Sailor Moon S, mainly the villains being the Witches 5, Professor Tomoe and Mistress 9 as well as the inclusion of all Sailor Guardians including Sailor Moon S’s new additional Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Saturn. With the Viz video releases now having reached the end of Sailor Moon SuperS this seems an odd way to do it. Perhaps the game was simply in development for too long or this may have been an intentional choice as many of the Sailor Guardians introduced in this season would not appear in Sailor Moon SuperS and a Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Monopoly game would not be as recognisable to fans. For whatever the reasons, it’s Sailor Moon S Monopoly!

As with many other versions of Monopoly this really is the same old game we’ve seen time and time again with a different esthetic. This was immediately obvious to me as I’ve played countless hours of the game in my youth and I even spent quite some time programming a Monopoly computer game in Turbo Pascal when I was a child (the game mostly worked well but lacked houses, hotels, Chance and Community Chest cards). This is good for purists who want to have the same game experience as normal Monopoly. One thing which I think is fairly odd however is the completely random grouping of characters for most of the properties. Allow me to rant a bit about each one.

First we have Luna and Artemis, as a single property, bundled with Mimette of the Witches 5. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just use this, one of the only two pairs of properties, as Luna and Artemis? Mimette does not fit with Luna and Artemis at all. The characters don’t ever actually interact.

Next we have Eudial, Viluy and Tellu. This actually works! They are 3 of the Witches 5 and since there are no sets of five properties (most are groups of three) this sort of works!

Then there’s Cyprene/Ptilol with Kaolinite and … Sailor Chibi Moon! Kaolinite does have a brief interaction with Chibiusa at some point and the two characters do show up together in succession in the later versions of the Sailor Moon S credits. Cyprene and Ptilol fit only with Kaolinite. It would have made more sense to have put Mimette with her fellow Witches and then put Chibiusa with either her parents or maybe with Sailor Saturn!

Next is Sailor Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. There are all Sailor Guardians so this works decently. Aside from Sailor Moon they do spend some time together before Sailor Venus joins the show so I’ll say this is one of the three less terrible one.

Next is Sailor Venus, Professor Tomoe and Sailor Pluto. None of these characters have much to do with each other, except perhaps for a brief interaction between Sailor Venus and Pluto in one episode of Sailor Stars. Sailor Venus belongs with the Sailor Guardians from the first season while Sailor Pluto fits in better with Sailor Uranus and Neptune or even with Sailor Chibi Moon. I would personally have put her with King Endymion but that’s because I like trolling people. Professor Tomoe is a villain and if he’s going to be paired with anyone but his fellow villains from the season it should probably be his daughter, and not the Sailor Guardians who steals his baby from him in Sailor Stars.

Next is Sailor Uranus and Neptune with … Tuxedo Mask! Naturally Sailor Pluto would have worked better here. There’s nothing these two lesbians love more than the show’s male love interest! At least Sailor Uranus and Neptune are together where they belong.

On the last side we have Sailor Moon with Sailor Saturn and Mistress 9. This sort of works since Sailor Moon fights Mistress 9 and sort of saves Sailor Saturn but these characters would fit so much better elsewhere. Saturn should be with her father or her friend Chibiusa and Mistress 9 could easily fit with the villains! It does of course work that two versions of Hotaru be grouped together.

Finally we have the only grouping that works well, and that is Neo Queen Serenity and King Endymion. The only issue here is that they don’t really appear in Sailor Moon S so they don’t fit with the game at all.

Other groupings make some sense! The railroads are all items, either Talismans or Sailor Saturn’s Silence Glaive. The utilities are replaced by Sailor Moon’s items, that being her broach and rod. Jail and Free Parking are unchanged. It seems like there’s an opportunity here to use something a bit more Sailor Moon themed for these. Maybe Pharaon 90 sends you to the Tau Star System or something like that. A missed opportunity which leaves art which ultimately clashes with the rest of the game.

When it comes to the game pieces they are nice! These are the three Talismans, Sailor Moon’s Cosmic Heart Compact and Spiral Heart Moon Rod, and the Holy Grail. They’re all things and not characters but then aside from the dog most Monopoly game pieces are just things anyway.

The money is a bit odd. The colours and values are more or less kept from real Monopoly with different characters appearing on each bill. The money is all shown with an M with a slash through it. Moon dollars or something of the sort. It’s not like Sailor Moon takes place in a universe they don’t use normal currency. We frequently see prices and money in the series being yen. Is there some rule that a themed Monopoly came have some weird non existent currency?

Finally we have the Love and Friendship Cards. These seem to basically be Chance and Community Chest cards with the flavour language changed and the same dollar amounts and consequences. The descriptions of what is occurring are just random events occurring during Sailor Moon S.

Should you buy this game? If you wanted to I imagine you already would have! It’s just one of a very, very, very long series of Monopoly games with images based on many franchises. The specific decisions made in adapting this game seem to be pretty poor as someone with a minor amount of effort would likely have been able to put together property groupings and other aspects of the game which work much better. It seems like someone with next to no knowledge of the franchise was given a list of characters, art and perhaps episode summaries of Sailor Moon S and that they threw together a version of Monopoly that superficially seemed to have made sense. For my money the Sailor Moon games by Dyskami Publishing are a much better way to play a Sailor Moon game.

Keep reading for more photos of this game.

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Check out the board and pieces for the upcoming Sailor Moon Monopoly game

Posted on September 29, 2018 by Adam

A Sailor Moon Monopoly game is coming! A listing for this game has been up with many retailers for a while now but we can now see, from the GameStop listing for the product, what the game’s board will look like! The game will retail for $39.99 US and will be released November 9th according to GameStop’s site. With the release of this version of Monopoly there will be as many different types of Monopoly games as there are Funko Pop toys at GameStop! The box and board feature all characters from the Sailor Moon S season including all 10 Sailor Guardians as well as other villains from that season such as Professor Tomoe, the Witches 5 and Mistress 9. Neo Queen Serenity and King Endymion are also on the game though those characters don’t make a proper appearance in the S season. As a long time Monopoly player it seems obvious that the values on most of the board match what people would be used to only all spaces are replaced with Sailor Moon themed characters and items. Properties are all characters with other characters and items making up others squares. I’ve listed a breakdown of what characters are replacing for every original Monopoly space:

Mediteranian Avenue – Luna and Artemis
Baltic Avenue – Mimete

Oriental Avenue – Eudial
Vermont Avenue – Viluy
Connecticut Avenue – Tellu

St. Charles Place – Cyprine/Ptilol
States Avenue – Sailor Chibi Moon
Virginia Avenue – Kaolinite

St. James Place – Sailor Mercury
Tennessee Avenue – Sailor Mars
New York Avenue – Sailor Jupiter

Kentucky Avenue – Sailor Venus
Indiana Avenue – Professor Tomoe
Illinois Avenue – Sailor Pluto

Atlantic Avenue – Tuxedo Mask
Ventor Avenue – Sailor Neptune
Marvin Gardens – Sailor Uranus

Pacific Avenue – Mistress 9
North Carolina Avenue – Sailor Saturn
Pennsylvania Avenue – Sailor Moon

Park Place – King Endymion
Boardwalk – Neo Queen Serenity

Reading Railroad – Garnet Rod
Pennsylvania Railroad – Deep Aqua Mirror
B. & O. Railroad – Space Sword
Short Line – Silence Glaive

Electric Company – Cosmic Heart Compact
Water Works – Spiral Moon Heart Rod

Community Chest – Love
Chance – Friendship

Income Tax and Luxury Tax – Something with the Witches 5?

The following spaces are unchanged:
Go
In Jail/Just Visiting
Free Parking
Go To Jail

In addition we can get a bit of a look at the “Sailor Moon Money” in this image and we see the following denominations on bills:

$1 – Sailor Moon
$5 – Sailor Chibi Moon
$10 – Sailor Mercury
$20 – Sailor Mars
$50 – Sailor Jupiter
$100 – Sailor Venus
$500 – Sailor Moon

Why Sailor Moon is on both the $1 and $500 isn’t clear! I may be mistaken as it’s hard to see exactly what it says on the $1 bill but it seems to have a crescent moon and the “Sailor” part is clear and the second 4 letter word appears to be Moon from the top of the letters we see. I’m not sure the $ is the appropriate symbol to be using in this case as there seems to be an M symbol to reference Sailor Moon Money when dollars are mentioned but it is a bit hard to make out. Sailor Moon Money has no basis in canon. Throughout most of the series the character live in Tokyo and would use Japanese Yen as currency. I don’t know what currency would be used in Crystal Tokyo but it seems unlikely that it would be called Sailor Moon Money as Sailor Moon is no longer an active superhero at the time, what with being the Queen of that city.

We also see what the tokens for the game will be. These are also listed on the GameStop site. These are the Cosmic Heart Compact, Moon Chalice, Spiral Heart Moon Rod, Garnet Orb, Deep Aqua Mirror and Space Sword. These are again all items appearing in Sailor Moon S.

Why Sailor Moon S? Why now? Sailor Moon SuperS has now been released in its entirety in North America on home video. Sailor Moon Sailor Stars is out subtitled on streaming services. When it comes to Sailor Moon Crystal we’ve only gotten up to the Infinity Arc, telling the equivalent of the Sailor Moon S story, but these are clearly original Sailor Moon anime based designs and not Sailor Moon Crystal designs like we’ve seen with the Sailor Moon Crystal Dice Challenge game. Surely there is the convenience of having all of the Sailor Guardians appearing in Sailor Moon S allowing for more properties with those characters in it. If we had a first season based game we might be seeing Queen Beryl and the Shitennou alongside Naru and Umino instead. There are certainly reasons for which Sailor Moon S makes sense for the game’s setting, but it still seems odd and a bit arbitrary to me.

Do you plan on picking this game up? How many versions of Monopoly do you own?

Sailor Moon Crystal Act 35, Infinity 9 – Infinite Labyrinth 2, review

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Adam

The latest episode of Sailor Moon Crystal premiered on Japanese TV on Monday June 6th at 11pm Japan Standard Time. Shortly afterwards, starting at around 10:30am, it was available to stream first on Crunchyroll and later on Neon Alley and Hulu. Act 35, Infinity 9 – Infinite Labyrinth, mostly takes place inside of Mistress 9 and in an elevator.

Mistress 9 ate the Silver Crystal of the future. This is the one Chibiusa stole from her mother in the 30th century and has been using to fight as Sailor Chibi Moon. More importantly, Chibiusa’s soul is now fundamentally tied to this Crystal which causes all sort of problems, mainly that she’ll die if it’s apart from her body and consumed by an evil entity. How exactly does this work? Sailor Moon’s Silver Crystal of the present is similarly tied to her soul. It’s her Star Seed and all that fun stuff. What’s Neo Queen Serenity doing in the future? In the last story arc Neo Queen Serenity still seems bound to the Silver Crystal of the future so what happened to her when her daughter went gallivanting around time with it? Sure she was dormant for most of the last season but now that her daughter is gone on her training is Crystal Tokyo defenseless? Did Neo Queen Serenity need to somehow disassociate herself from the Crystal? If I take a powerful Crystal and keep it in my pocket for too long will my soul get tied to it like Golum being bound to the one ring?

My favourite part of this episode takes place within Mistress 9. Chibiusa, bound to her Crystal, is lost inside of Mistress 9 who basically ate her. Hotaru goes out of her way to protect her and her Crystal. These are two sort of ghosts or spirits stuck inside of this body which has been controlled by this evil entity. Hotaru hasn’t known Chibiusa that long, but she has strong feelings for her and is protecting her with everything she has. It seems like Mistress 9 won’t be getting full access to that Crystal just yet, which is unfortunate since she immediately destroys the Taioron Crystal once she gets something better. This is kind of like getting a new phone, deciding you don’t need your older out of date phone, and destroying it only to realise there’s some software problem with the new one and you can’t use it but oops I obliterated the iPhone 4s. Too bad so sad.

A lot of this episode takes place in an elevator which somehow leads to a bunch of weird mistakes. Let’s see what we know. The gang starts on the 56th floor, obvious from the sign we see and what is mentioned, and Sailor Venus decides to take one group and go down floor by floor while Sailor Moon and the people who want to kill Hotaru are going to take the elevator to the basement. Look at this chart. How terrible is this thing? It has a column with floor numbers, a column with descriptions, a second column with floor numbers and … that’s it. There are no descriptions for the second column! What’s on floors 31 to 60? The manga equivalent pages show an extra column there with descriptions of what’s on those floors, but there’s nothing here. Minor nitpick but that’s how it is.

Sailor Moon gets in an elevator with Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and in doing so they go down. All indications from shots in the elevator shaft seem to indicate that it is going down at incredible speeds. A line in the manga, omitted from this version, speaks about the effect of the acceleration that Sailor Moon is feeling. Watching the floor numbers we seem to go from 50 to 40 in a number of seconds. Then we go from 30 to 20 in nearly a minute. It’s a few minutes more until we get to 6. Following this things get weird, we go into this weird other dimension, and then we arrive at floor zero. Or is it? There is clearly space for two digits on the display however when we are in single digit floors, like 6, we don’t have a preceding zero. It’s “6” not “06”. Also the numbers take up the full height of the display while the display on the final floor takes up half. The manga chapter has the gang travel down to floor negative infinity. With the infinity symbol, ∞, being like a horizontal 8. The manga has them mostly travel through basement floors to get there though. Here the floor indicator, which looks like “oo” could be taken to mean infinity. There is no negative floor indicator on the display. The reason for which those two os aren’t touching could be an artifact of the display. The show have easily avoided ambiguity by just putting another row of dots between the two numbers and having oo display as ∞. Also notable is that there are 60 buttons shown and 60 floors in the directory, so any basement floors don’t seem to be listed. If there really are on the minus infinity floor what does this even mean? If they go down infinity floors they would go through the earth, outside of our solar system and galaxy and beyond the reaches of the known universe.

There is a flashback to when the Death Busters arrived. We see the accident once again and Hotaru’s face is real messed up in one shot! Koalinite is called Kaori, as she appears to have been a normal human woman working for Professor Tomoe before this incident. She was infected by an egg and then Professor Tomoe decided to infect himself with one. We also learn that Mistress 9, who was placed inside of Hotaru, was once Pharaoh 90’s partner. This seems to be new to Sailor Moon Crystal. The other Witches 5 however were created artificially.

For the second time we see Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Pluto on their home planets. Uranus seems tiny. We can actually see the curvature of the planet. Uranus has a diameter of about 4 times that of the Earth. That means its surface is much flatter than the Earth’s surface. Do you ever find yourself gazing out at the horizon and actually noticing the curvature of the Earth? Probably not. Based on the curve we see here Uranus should be roughly the size of The Little Prince’s asteroid. Just imagine tracing out a circle from that thumbnail image and it wouldn’t even be larger than your computer screen. Alternatively if Uranus is the right size Sailor Uranus could be huge. She’d probably be about the size of the Earth’s Moon for this to work. Sailor Pluto appears to actually be on Pluto. Previously we saw her guarding the Space-Time Door but it wasn’t clear exactly where it was. What’s the deal with this thing? In Crystal Tokyo when there was this door at the end of a long hall which led to the Space-Time Corridor, were people traveling to Pluto as an intermediate before going back in time? Did the door itself move at some point? Who’s even protecting this door in the 30th century now that Sailor Pluto is dead, Diana went back in time and Neo Queen Serenity has no Crystal? Maybe it’s that pink haired kid who isn’t Chibiusa. How rare would children be in a world where humans live 1000 years? Pretty rare.

We learn that when they were bored and alone Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Pluto would look at Queen Serenity and Princess Serenity. For some reason Princess Serenity is pointing to her bracelet in this image. It must have been new at the time.

Bad news for Professor Tomoe, who turns into this big monster thing. Sailor Moon hesitates to kill him because he was Hotaru’s father a few minutes earlier. Realistically he hasn’t been Hotaru’s father for some time, though I wonder if Kaolinite and Professor Tomoe have little spirits of themselves wrapped up in thorns inside their minds somewhere. Oh well. He gets killed.

Sailor Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Venus are attacked and Super Sailor Moon transforms back into normal Sailor Moon. She seems to think this is because something happened to her friends. Not a great omen.

Next week is Act 36, Infinity 10 – Infinite – Upper Atmosphere. There’s more of Hotaru’s ghost resisting Mistress 9 and being all bad ass. With only three more episodes the story arc will be done soon. These next three episodes were originally one massive manga chapter!

Keep reading for more screenshots from this episode and the next episode preview for Act 36.

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Sailor Moon Crystal’s voice actors for Sailor Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and more revealed at this morning’s live event

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Adam

There was a live streaming event this morning in Japan, related to the upcoming Infinity arc of Sailor Moon Crystal. Art was shown, but since we’d seen that earlier this week this was not a big revelation. We did not get any details about a schedule for the series but we did get cast information for the upcoming season. Junko Minagawa, the voice of Sailor Uranus and Sayaka Ohara, the voice of Sailor Neptune, joined the event. The actress voicing Sailor Saturn, Fujii Yukiyo, showed up momentarily via a separate video.

In addition to this the actors playing the Death Busters, including the Witches 5, were announced. A full cast list, with IMDB links, is included below.

Sailor Uranus – Junko Minagawa
Sailor Neptune – Sayaka Ohara
Sailor Saturn – Yukiyo Fujii

Professor Tomoe – Takuya Kirimoto
Kaolinite – Hikari Yono
Pharaon 90 – Takaya Hashi

Eudial – Chiaki Takahashi
Mimete – Yuki Nagaku
Viluy – Rina Honizumi
Tellu – Naomi Ohzora
Cyprine – Umeka Shouji

I don’t watch much newer anime but a lot of these voice actors have a great deal of experience from recent years. MoonSisters.org posted a nice summary of all of their works on their Facebook Page. Most noteable is Takaya Hashi, who will be voicing Pharaon 90, who played a few small characters in the original Sailor Moon anime. He played Astronomer Dr. Sergai Ajimov in episode 120 of Sailor Moon S and the ventriloquist in the Sailor Moon SuperS Special.

Another odd thing was the inclusion of Cyprene but not Ptilol. In the recent musical Un Nouveau Voyage only Cyprene appeared, though Cyprene and Ptilol, twins, appeared together in the manga and original Sailor Moon anime. Assuming Sailor Moon Crystal will continue to be faithful to the manga it seems only logical that Ptilol will also be making an appearance. If this is the case she will likely also be voiced by Umeka Shouji.

Also announced at the event this morning was “The Exhibition of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon” in Tokyo from April 16th to June 19th. This exhibit will have stuff from the Sailor Moon comics and anime as well as merchandise for sale.

An image of the Infinity arc’s art was revealed, but as this was the same we’d seen earlier this week this wasn’t really anything new. We continue to wait for some confirmation of a timeline for the new episodes. At this point we can only speculate as to when it will be released.

Thanks to Twitter user @aers00 for streaming the event. I was unable to view the feed on Niconico and so I was happy to have an option to watch it while showering and getting ready this morning. I hope others who were looking to do the same found the feed as well.

The first episode of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars and final episode of Sailor Moon SuperS are now available on Hulu

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Adam

At long last Sailor Moon Sailor Stars now has an official release in the United States. Enjoy Hulu’s new banner featuring characters we won’t be seeing until 6 or more episodes from now! This morning the final episode of Sailor Moon SuperS and the first episode of Sailor Stars were added to Hulu and Neon Alley. New episodes will be added every Monday until the series completes. With this we finally wrap up the story with Queen Nehelenia… and then we unwrap that story because well the anime didn’t quite match up with the manga and we need to go back and fix a few things. Sailor Stars was first released in Japan back in 1996 but it was never released in English when the series was originally dubbed. Fans who were looking to see the end of the series originally had to trade fan subbed video tapes, buy the expensive laserdiscs and later buy either bootlegged DVDs or expensive imports with no English subtitles. Some of us actually did all of those. I’d like to thank VKLL for keeping me in Sailor Stars fansubs over the years. Before we get to the first episode of Sailor Stars, we have one more episode of SuperS to take care of.

Episode 166, Dreams Forever: Fill the Heavens With Light, finishes up a story which already sort of seems finished. The enemy seemed defeated as the children of the world, including the viewers, were asked to say “Moon Crisis Power” and vanquish evil, but Nehelenia has one last trick up her sleeve! The circus tent she’s on is floating away in the sky towards the Moon. We get some backstory on why Nehelenia is evil. She was afraid to become old so she ate the mirrors of all of the people who loved her. Before retreating into her mirror she tosses Sailor Chibi Moon off of the tent to her death. Sailor Moon, being the bad ass that she is, does not hesitate and dives after her. This shows Sailor Moon’s true strength. She has no plan. She does not have any reason to expect this to work out but she refuses to give up even for a moment and jumps to her certain death to save her daughter. What follows is a fairly long but tense plunge down to the Earth as Sailor Moon eventually catches up to Sailor Chibi Moon. She finally wakes and summons Pegasus just in time to give them wings and save them right now the ground. Never mind that they are seen breaching the top of skyscrapers over a minute before being rescued, much longer than it would take a person falling at terminal velocity to hit the ground, but this is just for dramatic effect. The world is saved. Chibiusa is saved. Everyone is happy. Chibiusa and Helios say their goodbyes as the Amazoness Quartet decide it wouldn’t be their style to do the same. It is a bit sad that these characters don’t get to become Sailor Guardians like they should have, but the first six episodes of Sailor Stars have enough to fix without doing anything about that.

In the final scene of this episode all characters are wearing familiar clothes. They are actually wearing the exact same things they were wearing at the beginning of the Sailor Moon R movie both in the credits, at the flower garden and then at the Hikawa Shrine. All of Sailor Moon S and SuperS have taken place since the R movie! What are the chances that six people happen to be wearing all of the same clothes on the exact same day after two years? Chibiusa, naturally, is wearing something different. She would not likely have fit in her old clothes and it may not have been kept after her trip to the future and back. What do the movie and this episode have in common? I couldn’t find much though they were both directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. This may be one reason for the similarity.

The Sailor Moon R Movie	Sailor Moon SuperS episode 166
The Sailor Moon R Movie	Sailor Moon SuperS episode 166

Episode 167, The Flower of Nightmares Scatters: The Queen of Darkness Returns, is the first episode of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars, but we won’t be seeing the Sailor Starlights, Star Crystals, Sailor Animamates or Sailor Chibi Chibi for a while. Why not? Well because we have to redo a bit of Sailor Moon SuperS to get things to the baseline they need to be at for Sailor Stars. A recurring problem with the original Sailor Moon anime is that it gets written while the manga is still in development so the stories deviate a lot. The main problem that this episode has to make up for is that Sailor Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Saturn were in the later half of the Dream arc of the manga but did not appear in Sailor Moon SuperS. There was this whole story in the manga where Hotaru grows at a fast rate and then they come join the rest of the gang. In the manga Professor Tomoe died in the big battle but in the anime he survived and kept Hotaru, his daughter who he loved. His daughter who he literally sold his soul to protect. The single only important thing in the world to him, his beloved daughter, is snatched away by Setsuna in this episode. This is completely unforgiveable and this is the kind of mess you end up with when your show deviates too much from the source material and then you have to play catch up.

Annoyingly we have to pretend Chibiusa is leaving again. This scene is absolutely terrible. I just can’t stand anything about it. We’ve seen Chibiusa try to leave and fail in Sailor Moon R a bunch of times, and then we see her leave in what is actually a very touching scene. Then Sailor Moon S wraps up with the fake leaving, which is lifted from the manga, which has Chibiusa make a big deal about leaving but then come back immediately. So now Chibiusa tries to leave but can’t because there are shooting stars which it turns out aren’t really what they seem. To make matters worse we do all of this song and dance but Chibiusa’s days are actually numbered and she will leave the series between episodes, with no tearful send off, and is erased from the show like Pootchie going back to his home planet. Surely some may have felt that there was too much focus on Chibiusa in Sailor Moon SuperS, but the answer to this is not, as Sailor Stars plays out, simply to erase her from the story. This scene should have been removed and placed when Chibiusa actually leaves, a time which should have had a stronger emotional impact, but here we are. So Nehelenia is back and the gang is all back together as Setsuna shows up with this new baby while Haruka and Michiru are fighting bad guys. They get their suits upgraded and now we’re all but caught up. Mostly. More on Saturn next episode.

Oh boy that was a pretty negative review. I guess I have strong feelings on some of these things. Don’t let my pessimism keep you from watching! There’s a lot of good stuff in Sailor Moon Sailor Stars to come and this first chunk of six episodes is a very good short arc of episodes which just doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the season.

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All of Sailor Moon S is now available on Hulu

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Adam

This week with the two latest additions of Sailor Moon to Hulu we get episodes 126 and 127. This completes the Sailor Moon S season, so fans can now watch all of the first 3 seasons of Sailor Moon for free on Hulu and Neon Alley. We actually wrapped up the main story of Sailor Moon S last week with episode 125 so now we have a couple of sort of terrible episodes focusing on other things which happen following the main altercation with Mistress 9, Pharaon 90 and Sailor Saturn which no one ever asked for but that we are getting anyway.

Episode 126, A New Life: Parting of the Stars of Destiny, seemingly immediately follows episode 125. We don’t actually follow up with what Super Sailor Moon and Baby Hotaru will do but instead we start by seeing Chibiusa asleep. We eventually do see where Baby Hotaru ended up. She is with her father, Professor Tomoe, who is obviously still recuperating from his injuries. Chibiusa is happy to see that Hotaru is healthy and safe, though it seems like it might be a while until they can hang out again. It’s important to note that Professor Tomoe is relatively innocent in this whole affair. He was controlled by an evil entity all this time. The only thing he did which was wrong was that he agreed to allow some unseen unknown power to bring his daughter back to life while still suffering from the trauma of seeing her die. Almost anyone would have made that same decision. At this point it seems like there is a happy ending for Professor Tomoe and Hotaru. It would certainly be bad if in not too much time some girls who previously tried to murder this baby came by and forcefully took her from her father. All that is well and good but now the episode gets really awful. Everyone should have been totally cool with Usagi being great but instead Sailor Uranus and Neptune randomly start to fight Sailor Moon because they want her to prove that she’s really worthy. She doesn’t really do anything to prove this worth, and just fights for a bit, and maybe because they respect that she’s kind of scrappy they have a complete change of heart, kneel to her and we’re all friends again. What an awful waste of time that leaves a sour taste in our mouths for characters that were otherwise so well handled for the rest of the season. Too bad we won’t be seeing them at all next season.

Episode 127, A Guardian’s Realization: Strength Lies Within a Pure Heart, may seem a bit familiar to fans. Didn’t we just see this in Sailor Moon Crystal? It’s time for Chibiusa to leave, again, but she’s quite sad about it. The real failure of this episode is that Chibiusa gave a better and more emotionally touching goodbye at the end of episode 88, after she left at the end of Sailor Moon R. Here we sort of do a weaker version of that sadness and Chibiusa once again leaves. She returns almost immediately though, which is reminiscent of the manga. When Chibiusa leaves after the Black Moon story arc of the manga, as seen in Sailor Moon Crystal episode 26, she immediately returns. This doesn’t happen the first time around in the anime as Chibiusa remains gone for a number of episodes. Perhaps the writers would have kept her away had the plot of Sailor Moon S, based on the Infinity arc of the Manga, not required her to be linked to Hotaru’s story. I feel this episode should simply not have happened and instead we should have seen this in Sailor Stars. By the time Chibiusa finally leaves for the future she’s fake left three times before finally leaving anti climactically between episodes. Chibiusa isn’t being forgotten any time soon though. She’s about to dominate the screen for the entire next season as Sailor Moon SuperS, which will begin streaming on Hulu next Monday, is all about Chibiusa!

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Sailor Moon S episodes 124 and 125 and the dubbed version of the second half of Sailor Moon R are now available on Hulu

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Adam

We’ve gotten a lot more than usual added to Hulu and Neon Alley this week. Sailor Moon S is almost done as we wrap up most of the story with episodes 124 and 125, introducing us to Sailor Saturn. In addition fans can also watch the second half of Sailor Moon R, episodes 69 to 89, dubbed by Viz on Hulu. These episodes were added with this past Friday’s Moonlight Party 4.

Episode 124, The Coming Terror of Darkness: Struggle of the Eight Guardians, is where a bunch of fighting happens before the epic finale. The Sailor Guardians are set to stop Mistress 9 and so they are storming the enemy stronghold. Sailor Pluto freezes time to prevent a helicopter accident and dies anticlimactically for breaking this taboo. Sound familiar? Indeed, this is taken right out of the Black Moon Clan story arc of the manga, only Sailor Pluto doesn’t die in Sailor Moon R and her returning for the SuperS movie and Sailor Stars is not ever really explained. So a ton of monsters show up. They are red proto Daimon type things which is what happens when you don’t put a Daimon seed in anything. They are quickly dispensed with. Inside the building Sailor Uranus and Neptune confront Professor Tomoe, or rather the Daimon Germatoid who is in control of him. The two are separated so that Germatoid can be dispensed with leaving Professor Tomoe as the good guy he once was. Sailor Moon has a fun confrontation with Hotaru, who tries to get the Holy Grail, because she’s really just evil Mistress 9 posing as an innocent girl. This doesn’t really work out as Mistress 9 is revealed once again!

Episode 125, The Shining Shooting Star: Saturn and the Messiah, features the very very brief appearance of Sailor Saturn. As Sailor Guardians go Sailor Saturn is the least shown one of the bunch as this it the only time we will see her until Sailor Stars and she is the only Sailor Guardian never to get an animated transformation sequence. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re still dealing with Mistress 9! She couldn’t get the Holy Grail from Sailor Moon in the last episode so she tries to get her father to get it which … works perfectly. Sailor Moon gives the grail to Professor Tomoe who in turn hands it to his daughter. But Mistress 9 puts it in the big Galaxy contraption thing to summon Pharaon 90, the big evil from the season that we haven’t really seen at all, but we are to believe he’s behind all the bad stuff. Things are going bad but… Hotaru turns into Sailor Saturn! This is great! She returns Chibiusa’s Pure Heart to her. Everything is looking up. Sailor Saturn can even go and kill Pharaon 90, too bad she’ll have to die to do it. The moral thought expedient continues! First we wanted to kill Hotaru to stop the end of the world but now she is willing to sacrifice herself to save the world. The end result is still Hotaru dying, but since she is willing it’s somehow better. Sailor Moon won’t have it though. She was not on board with killing Hotaru and she is not on board with letting Sailor Saturn kill herself and so she hurls herself into Pharaon 90 after Sailor Saturn. Emerging from the chaos is a battered Super Sailor Moon and a baby Hotaru. This pretty much ends the main story of Sailor Moon S. What follows next week are two kind of terrible episodes which follow the conclusion of the primary story arc.

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Watch Sailor Moon S episodes 122 and 123 on Hulu

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Adam

We’re getting that much closer to the end of Sailor Moon S with the two latest episodes added to Hulu and Neon Alley. This week with episodes 122 and 123 we get introduced to three more members of the Witches 5!

Episode 122, Believe in Love: Ami, the Kindhearted Guardian, is a total Sailor Mercury episode. In fact it’s very reminiscent of her first episode in which the Dark Kingdom uses computers to try to drain Crystal Seminar students’ energy to feed to Metalia. This week the Death Busters are using computers to steal Mugen Academy students’ Pure Hearts to feed to Hotaru. As we are getting close to the end of the season we need to go through more of the Witches 5 and so we are introduced to Viluy. Viluy poses as a student at Mugen Academy, Yui Bidou, and in doing so she crosses Ami who is investigating the school. She is very intelligent and we learn that the research done at Mugen Academy is not only cutting edge for the mid 90s but actually quite ahead of anything we’ve done by 2015. She has an army of nano robots. Nano robots or nanobots are miniscule robots which, when working as a team, are capable of great feats such as turning the world into grey goo. We have nothing close to what is portrayed in this episode in existence today as nanotechnology is still in its early stages. Viluy uses these robots to attack the Sailor Guardians but when her bracelet is damaged they end up turning on her which kills her. This episode continues to ask us moral questions as Ami defends Hotaru from Haruka and Michiru who want to kill her in order to save the world from destruction.

Episode 123, Shadow of Destruction: the Messiah of Silence Awakens, introduces us to the final two members of the Witches 5. Cyrpine and Ptilol are considered to be a single member of the Witches 5 because of reasons I don’t pretend to understand. Do we refer to twins as a single entity? Then why are we calling a six member team the Witches 5? I think it’s nonsense personally, but that is what they are called. How much can they be considered to be a single person when they end up attacking each other? Things get pretty serious in this episode as Kaolinite kidnaps Sailor Chibi Moon. Her Pure Heart is so great that when it’s fed to Hotaru she transforms into Mistress 9. This leaves Chibiusa near death as Mamoru needs to use his own body’s energy to sustain her life. The gang is now ready to confront Mistress 9 and the Death Busters in the next handful of episodes. They missed their chance to kill Hotaru while she was young and defenseless. We’ll see what kind of destruction she will bring now. A funny scene in this episode shows Professor Tomoe adjusting his glasses with his middle finger, making it seem like he’s making a rude gesture.

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Sailor Moon S episodes 120 and 121 are now available on Hulu

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Adam

The two latest episodes of Sailor Moon S have been added to Hulu and Neon Alley. This week we have a bunch of the Witches 5 dying as we explore the mysterious Mugen Academy and get some backstory on Hotaru and Professor Tomoe’s tragic past. Why does so much happen in such a short time? Well there are not many episodes of Sailor Moon S left and there’s a lot of story related to the Infinity Arc which we haven’t touched on at this rate so the solution is just to go through characters and plot points at neck break speed. A bit of a change from the first season where each of the Shitennou were given roughly equal billing and now we have a very uneven distribution of episodes for each of the Witches 5.

Episode 120, An Invasion from Another Dimension: Mystery of Mugen Academy, goes into Hotaru and Professor Tomoe’s history a bit. Now that Sailor Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are sort of trying to kill Hotaru, her and her family have skipped town. Chibiusa tries to see her but is unable to. A little research into Professor Tomoe shows that he has a tragic past. In a flashback scene we see him in a lab accident which seems to kill Hotaru. An entity from another dimension, Pharaon 90, appears to offer to save her life but in exchange he enters Professor Tomoe’s eye, essentially taking over his body. While Professor Tomoe is this season’s villain, he actually cares a lot for his family and is powerless to stop the enemy. We learn that Professor Tomoe owns Mugen Academy, the school that Hotaru, Haruka and Michiru attend. Mugen is the Japanese word for Infinity. When this manga arc is referred to as the Infinity Arc, the word is Mugen, which is also the name of the school. At Mugen Academy Mimete uploads herself into a monitor, which seems like a great plan until Tellu shows up. In the style of all of the Witches 5, she pulls the plug and Mimete dies! We are tempted to cry for Mimete as she begs for her life with her cutesy little voice, but let’s not forget that she killed Eudial in cold blood not long ago.

Episode 121, A Bewitching Flower That Steals Hearts: Tellu, the Third Witch, further develops the very short lived Tellu. When at episodes 120 you’ve only shown two of the six Witches 5 you have a problem which can only be solved by killing a bunch of them in short time. Last episode Tellu killed Mimete and we need to off her too if we want to move on! Tellu’s short lived single episode plan involves using evil plants to steal people’s Pure Hearts. This all goes decently but not really well for her and she ends up getting killed by her own plant monster. Oops! Now we only have three more of the Witches 5 to get through with 6 episodes left in the season. Also Kaolinite is still around and being the villain so we’ll have to take care of her at some point. With Tellu defeated she leaves behind a student ID from Mugen Academy. That place again, two episodes in a row? Well we didn’t talk about it for the rest of the season but something definitely seems up with it now!

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