When you realize a great majority of the Sailor Moon tag has probably never seen Sailor Moon uncensored and with its proper dialog and the intact ending to the first season.
o____o they need to re-license SM so people can see the uncensored version. (also so I can finally buy STARS on dvd… I have…
It saddens me to know that the younger anime fans aren’t familiar with the true version of Sailor Moon. =( It was the first, the very first anime I ever saw and it BLEW MY MIND. Seriously, the unedited version is so good. Hell I’m not even into anime anymore, but my love for Sailor Moon is still strong. I also feel like an elitist, when I talk about it (the first season finale was butchered SO BAD! And I have Stars on bootleg DVD!). XD
I would HIGHLY recommend reading the manga, it’s currently being reprinted! Like, right now, as we speak! Even though I don’t participate in the fandom anymore, Sailor Moon is a part of my childhood just as much as Disney is. Heck, Usagi was the earliest ‘warrior princess’ character I ever recall seeing in a series. I still adore her character, her strength, her love, her power, everything about her. Read the manga or watch the subs to see the real Sailor Moon. It’s worth it.
I agree with all of this, but a show that I also loved when I was younger got treatment that may have been worse. Anyone remember a little show about fighter planes that transformed into mecha called Robotech? While I got into it a little later than I did Sailor Moon (I saw it infrequently in late elementary and middle school and didn’t see the entire series until Toonami aired it, whereas I watched Sailor Moon starting in early elementary school whenever I was up early enough), I loved it dearly for its more serious plotline and gratuitous missile barrages. I even read some of the books that were put out, though they helped clue me in to the fact that something was wonky with the later seasons.
Fast forward a decade or so, and I decide to start looking into my old favorite animes, as I was in prime fansub downloading mode. I knew vaguely that Robotech’s original name was Macross, but there were several Macross series by that point and I didn’t know which one was which. I started looking into it a bit more and find out… holy shit, my beloved childhood mecha anime, the one that primed me for a serious Gundam Wing fanboy syndrome a few years later, was… a mashup?
It turns out that when Harmony Gold acquired the Macross license back in the 80s, it wasn’t long enough to suit an American seasonal slot. So, the apparently obvious thing to do was to grab two other, unrelated licenses that they owned (Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross, to be exact) in order to fill out the episode numbers and mash the stories into place as best they could. From what I understand, this wasn’t uncommon at the time, as their were questions about American interest in anime and the appropriateness of some of the issues addressed in the plotlines (see: the above-mentioned butchery of the Sailor Moon season one ending, any shonen anime that received blood editing, the short-lived run of Cardcaptor Sakura, etc.)
I have to admit, I’m still not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I loved Robotech and consider it to be one of the three main reasons I got into anime (the other two being Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors); on the other… well, it’s never fun to find out that one of your cherished childhood memories involved breaking one of your big rules for a fandom (in this case, massive executive meddling with the translation).
