Following the brief news of the live action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon series airing on Toei Channel which was quickly scrubbed from the site, the series has been officially confirmed to be coming next week! As I suspected this news was posted to the Toei Channel site too quickly and was removed so that the news could be shared on the official Sailor Moon site first. A few days ago I did notice that the show’s page was back on the Toei Channel web site. At the time it wasn’t yet posted on the official site, but shortly afterwards an article did show up!

This will be following the same schedule I had originally posted about. Two new episodes at 5pm Japan Standard Time each Friday with a repeat of those episodes the next morning, Saturday at 8am.

If you’re in the Japan, enjoy the first airing of this fine series in over two decades! For those of us outside of Japan we can only hope that this show returning to the air in Japan will mean that the rights will become available and that we might get an official release on home video!

For a few hours yesterday the Toei Channel Japanese TV station web site confirmed that it was going to be airing reruns of the 2003 Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon TV series. I saw these posts and pages with my own eyes, did not think it necessary to take screenshots, and now they have all been scrubbed from the Internet. How fun. Does this mean the show will actually be airing on July 4th as was originally announced? Who knows.

I first saw about this from a post on the blu-ray.com forums by user Gowho which linked to a Tweet by the official Toei channel Twitter account (now deleted), a list of next month’s upcoming shows on the TOEI channel web site (still up with no mention of the Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon series), and a link to the page for the show on the Toei channel web site (now an error 404 page not found). So Twitter has a few people quote Tweeting a now delete Tweet expressing joy that the show is coming back. Fantastic.

The Toei Channel schedule for July 4th does not list the show as playing at 5pm (17:00) but it also doesn’t list any show as playing at 5pm. The length of the shows is included in the table and the show playing at 4pm (16:00) is 60 minutes long and followed by a show at 6pm (18:00). So what happened to Sailor Moon? While the schedule is currently empty it wasn’t earlier! Twitter user Fred Francis was able to grab and share screenshots of the show’s page and schedule for the first 8 Acts, through to the end of July. It listed the first two episodes airing on July 4th with another two episodes airing every week after that along with rerun times for each episode.

What does all this mean? The original idea was pretty straightforward. The show was fairly on brand to have on the Toei Channel and this was clear confirmation that it would air. Did something happen between yesterday and today that made airing it impossible? I really can’t speculate. We will have to keep an eye out on the Toei Channel web site and schedule to see if they get updated. It would certainly be great if the show as indeed airing again. This could lead to a rerelease of the show on home video in Japan and perhaps the international rights could become available once again. When Discotek Media was asked about the rights for the series on a stream on October 16th 2023 they simply said that it wasn’t available from the licenser. Could this have changed?

It’s no secret that I love the live action series! I hope this leads to something! What do you think? Do you have any insight or leads with info on this? I’ll be sure to post updated information if and when we get it.

Update: After thinking about this a bit I think the reason for this change may be that they were waiting to announce this through other channels. If they planned to post it to the official Sailor Moon site or through an event before updating the channel’s web site, this would explain why they deleted all details about the announcement from the site.