Unexpected Sailor Moon is Unexpected
I wasn't expecting posting so soon, but I found out something I couldn't help but have thoughts about.Besides the fact that I have apparently been living under a rock.
It's been 21 years since Sailor Moon hit the airwaves in Japan. That's right, the show aired from 1992 to 1997 in Japan, and 1995 to 2000 in it's censored form in the US, famously omitting season 5. It turns out at Usagi's 20th anniversary party last year, it was announced the Sailor Moon was getting a reboot. That's right. Naoko Takeuchi approves and everything. Apparently this reboot will stay truer to the manga.
A side note about Sailor Moon. I didn't watch it. In fact, for years I hated Sailor Moon with a passion because every guy I met who liked anime (And most of the clubs I joined were male) assumed I was a Moonie, would ask me questions about the show, and generally treat me like dog shit for loving a show they viewed as feminine and inferior. A show I'd never seen. For which I owned no merchandise. Which I never talked about because I'd of had nothing to say.
Sailor Moon was a gateway show for girls, and over half the female anime fans my age you meet would have to confess that Sailor Moon was their gateway drug. I still think Sailor Moon is way better than Dragon Ball Z, which was the male gateway show, but at this stage in my life I hadn't quite worked out that it was the guy's attitudes I was mad at, not the show itself.
I did eventually see the first three seasons. Actually, I own all the hideous pink Sailor Moon VHS tapes, and all of the Doom Tree set. I was ashamed of this for a long time, really, because I didn't want to like Sailor Moon. Thankfully I've relaxed about my issues with gender roles, and while I've never been in love with Sailor Moon, I can admit that I actually kind of like it. However, I will be blunt and point out...I never liked it enough to hunt it down in an uncensored subtitled form or read the manga. Many American fans did, especially when the show stopped dead on TV. You have to respect their fervor for the show. It wasn't treated especially well, for all the fans it seemed to have. For years the fifth season wasn't available in the states, there were copious rewrites and censoring to cover up various elements, including lesbians and death, and all and all it was reduced to being a kid's show in the US because at that point we still very firmly thought animation=children. I was at Anime-Expo the year they released the three Sailor Moon movies on VHS tapes. There was extreme excitement.
And I get why it has been so popular for American audiences. While we're getting better, American television has not been kind with 'girly' programming, and really pointedly in the nineties there wasn't much that was clearly for girls. In the eighties you had Jem, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, She-Ra, Beverly Hills Teens, Hello Kitty, Lady Lovely Locks, Rose Petal Place, Moondreamers, Maple Town, and of course a swath of more gender neutral stuff like Muppet Babies or Alvin and the Chipmunks, and lots and lots of programming really aimed at boys.
However, by the early ninties most of the specifically and unabashedly girl's oriented stuff had dried up. Disney was running their Disney Afternoon line up, but not one of those shows had a female lead, though there was the Little Mermaid show. We had Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders (95-96), Powerpuff Girls in 1995I and 1997 we got Daria and Pepper Ann. Still, compare that with the nearly hundreds of oter animated distinctly male flavored shows, chicks had not much selection, and what there was was slanted young. Taking into account all of televsion, your choices as a teen in this time were this small time kids stuff, or any number of gender neutral sitcoms or dramaedys like Saved by the Bell, or 90210. Is it any wonder Sailor Moon was a hit? It is a show clearly for females, but contained more in it that just a girl trying to get a boy. I mean, she did that, yes, but she also saved the world. In the early nintinies we didn't let women save the world. In that same year, '95, Sailor Moon and Xena would leap onto the screen, both in equally short skirts.
While I like it, and it is girly, like my other loves Sugar Sugar Rune, Princess TuTu or any number of magical girl shows, it also is a little hollow. There was a swath of animation in the 90's that wasn't very good, and Sailor Moon is looking...worn. It was that hideous palate we saw in Ranma 1/2 or..Hana Yori Dango, or anything else that aired at the time; washed out blues and pinks, poop brown, avacado green and eye searing orange and magenta. So, yeah, the animation is meh. And there is a lot of filler. For a show of this length, there are a few elements that are undeveloped.
So, is this ripe for a reboot?
I think so.
What we have to remember in regards to Sailor Moon, is that it was one of the very first Mahou Shoujo (Magical Girl) shows to feature fighting. I know, right? It's true though. The term Mahou Shoujo/Magical girl, comes from manga and television series which began as early as the sixties, with Mahoutsukai Sally/Sally the Witch, Himitsu no Akko-chan/Akko-chan's Secret, the inspiration of both those shows being well, Bewitched. Japan took the idea of a woman with magical abilities, q la Bewtiched, Tabitha, I Dream of Jeannie, uncoupled the supernatural woman from the man and made her a kid. For the next twenty years a Mahou Shoujo show meant something like Magical Princess Minky Momo from 1982. Which is a young girl with transformative or other abilities going into the world and doing good, charitable things. Very often she needs to disguise herself from her true identity to accomplish this.
Sailor Moon was one of the first to make the mahou shoujo and give her enemies. So, while the series seems kind of fluffy and silly now, it really was the bridge builder between those early days and the many kinds of magical shows we have now, ranging from the sweet Full Moon wo Sagashite, to the dark Madoka Magica, the awesome Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, the fascinating Princess Tutu, satirical Puni Puni Poemi and every shade in between, where girls fight evil, recapture cards, become idol singers, or, you know, transform from mermaids to humans and sing. Whatever. It's a genre with a lot of different shades.
So, Sailor Moon should get an update, sooth those rough corners, now that we can take this storys eriously if we want. I'd love to see Naoko's designs really beautifully animated and out of the crap of the ninties. Following the manga probably won't be a bad idea, and what author doesn't look back at their work twenty years on and see some stuff to be improved on? We might actually get an undiluted version, this time. I know some fans will be completely against it, but in all honesty, the show had so much filler. In fact, it had half a season of compleyely made up shit because the anime had caught up to Nako's publishing of the manga, so they had to buy time for her to get ahead.
Now, the fact that this has been backed up to a winter release after being touted as a summer? Well. From what I understand about the seasons of anime, the Winter season is sort of the crappiest one. No one puts their big shows here, the winter season gets more experimental or run-of-the-mill stuff. But I don't know if this means it's like American movies being released in January; a sure sign of a stinker. It could also mean, like with American movies, that the project needed more work, so they gave themselves more time, or, that they didn't want to put it up against a lot of competition.
Weirdly enough, no art has been released so we can see the new look. Not a peep. There is some bogus art, but no officail stuff, it seems. Which I think speaks to the confidence of the studio. They don't have to advertise this mother. We are all tuning in, and we all will be able to. In a stroke of brilliance, the show will be available to stream world wide when it airs. How awesome is that?
...I am totally going to make stepbrother watch with me, come December.
It's been 21 years since Sailor Moon hit the airwaves in Japan. That's right, the show aired from 1992 to 1997 in Japan, and 1995 to 2000 in it's censored form in the US, famously omitting season 5. It turns out at Usagi's 20th anniversary party last year, it was announced the Sailor Moon was getting a reboot. That's right. Naoko Takeuchi approves and everything. Apparently this reboot will stay truer to the manga.
A side note about Sailor Moon. I didn't watch it. In fact, for years I hated Sailor Moon with a passion because every guy I met who liked anime (And most of the clubs I joined were male) assumed I was a Moonie, would ask me questions about the show, and generally treat me like dog shit for loving a show they viewed as feminine and inferior. A show I'd never seen. For which I owned no merchandise. Which I never talked about because I'd of had nothing to say.
Sailor Moon was a gateway show for girls, and over half the female anime fans my age you meet would have to confess that Sailor Moon was their gateway drug. I still think Sailor Moon is way better than Dragon Ball Z, which was the male gateway show, but at this stage in my life I hadn't quite worked out that it was the guy's attitudes I was mad at, not the show itself.
I did eventually see the first three seasons. Actually, I own all the hideous pink Sailor Moon VHS tapes, and all of the Doom Tree set. I was ashamed of this for a long time, really, because I didn't want to like Sailor Moon. Thankfully I've relaxed about my issues with gender roles, and while I've never been in love with Sailor Moon, I can admit that I actually kind of like it. However, I will be blunt and point out...I never liked it enough to hunt it down in an uncensored subtitled form or read the manga. Many American fans did, especially when the show stopped dead on TV. You have to respect their fervor for the show. It wasn't treated especially well, for all the fans it seemed to have. For years the fifth season wasn't available in the states, there were copious rewrites and censoring to cover up various elements, including lesbians and death, and all and all it was reduced to being a kid's show in the US because at that point we still very firmly thought animation=children. I was at Anime-Expo the year they released the three Sailor Moon movies on VHS tapes. There was extreme excitement.
And I get why it has been so popular for American audiences. While we're getting better, American television has not been kind with 'girly' programming, and really pointedly in the nineties there wasn't much that was clearly for girls. In the eighties you had Jem, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, She-Ra, Beverly Hills Teens, Hello Kitty, Lady Lovely Locks, Rose Petal Place, Moondreamers, Maple Town, and of course a swath of more gender neutral stuff like Muppet Babies or Alvin and the Chipmunks, and lots and lots of programming really aimed at boys.
However, by the early ninties most of the specifically and unabashedly girl's oriented stuff had dried up. Disney was running their Disney Afternoon line up, but not one of those shows had a female lead, though there was the Little Mermaid show. We had Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders (95-96), Powerpuff Girls in 1995I and 1997 we got Daria and Pepper Ann. Still, compare that with the nearly hundreds of oter animated distinctly male flavored shows, chicks had not much selection, and what there was was slanted young. Taking into account all of televsion, your choices as a teen in this time were this small time kids stuff, or any number of gender neutral sitcoms or dramaedys like Saved by the Bell, or 90210. Is it any wonder Sailor Moon was a hit? It is a show clearly for females, but contained more in it that just a girl trying to get a boy. I mean, she did that, yes, but she also saved the world. In the early nintinies we didn't let women save the world. In that same year, '95, Sailor Moon and Xena would leap onto the screen, both in equally short skirts.
While I like it, and it is girly, like my other loves Sugar Sugar Rune, Princess TuTu or any number of magical girl shows, it also is a little hollow. There was a swath of animation in the 90's that wasn't very good, and Sailor Moon is looking...worn. It was that hideous palate we saw in Ranma 1/2 or..Hana Yori Dango, or anything else that aired at the time; washed out blues and pinks, poop brown, avacado green and eye searing orange and magenta. So, yeah, the animation is meh. And there is a lot of filler. For a show of this length, there are a few elements that are undeveloped.
So, is this ripe for a reboot?
I think so.
What we have to remember in regards to Sailor Moon, is that it was one of the very first Mahou Shoujo (Magical Girl) shows to feature fighting. I know, right? It's true though. The term Mahou Shoujo/Magical girl, comes from manga and television series which began as early as the sixties, with Mahoutsukai Sally/Sally the Witch, Himitsu no Akko-chan/Akko-chan's Secret, the inspiration of both those shows being well, Bewitched. Japan took the idea of a woman with magical abilities, q la Bewtiched, Tabitha, I Dream of Jeannie, uncoupled the supernatural woman from the man and made her a kid. For the next twenty years a Mahou Shoujo show meant something like Magical Princess Minky Momo from 1982. Which is a young girl with transformative or other abilities going into the world and doing good, charitable things. Very often she needs to disguise herself from her true identity to accomplish this.
Sailor Moon was one of the first to make the mahou shoujo and give her enemies. So, while the series seems kind of fluffy and silly now, it really was the bridge builder between those early days and the many kinds of magical shows we have now, ranging from the sweet Full Moon wo Sagashite, to the dark Madoka Magica, the awesome Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, the fascinating Princess Tutu, satirical Puni Puni Poemi and every shade in between, where girls fight evil, recapture cards, become idol singers, or, you know, transform from mermaids to humans and sing. Whatever. It's a genre with a lot of different shades.
So, Sailor Moon should get an update, sooth those rough corners, now that we can take this storys eriously if we want. I'd love to see Naoko's designs really beautifully animated and out of the crap of the ninties. Following the manga probably won't be a bad idea, and what author doesn't look back at their work twenty years on and see some stuff to be improved on? We might actually get an undiluted version, this time. I know some fans will be completely against it, but in all honesty, the show had so much filler. In fact, it had half a season of compleyely made up shit because the anime had caught up to Nako's publishing of the manga, so they had to buy time for her to get ahead.
Now, the fact that this has been backed up to a winter release after being touted as a summer? Well. From what I understand about the seasons of anime, the Winter season is sort of the crappiest one. No one puts their big shows here, the winter season gets more experimental or run-of-the-mill stuff. But I don't know if this means it's like American movies being released in January; a sure sign of a stinker. It could also mean, like with American movies, that the project needed more work, so they gave themselves more time, or, that they didn't want to put it up against a lot of competition.
Weirdly enough, no art has been released so we can see the new look. Not a peep. There is some bogus art, but no officail stuff, it seems. Which I think speaks to the confidence of the studio. They don't have to advertise this mother. We are all tuning in, and we all will be able to. In a stroke of brilliance, the show will be available to stream world wide when it airs. How awesome is that?
...I am totally going to make stepbrother watch with me, come December.