Sailor Moon- All about this brat named Serena who whines a lot, runs away from danger constantly ("Never running from a real fight" Wha? Whoever wrote those lyrics to the Sailor Moon theme song obviously never watched the show). It's also about her cats, her friends Sailors Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury, who are all much cooler than Sailor Moon, I must say. They fight these villains from the negaverse, a place that's really gloomy and generally sucks. Quite hilarious, I recommend it to anyone who has 30 minutes to blow and an open mind.

Title character in the anime/manga series Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon. Originally the princess of the Moon Kingdom during the Silver Millennium a thousand years ago, she was killed when the forces of the Dark Kingdom destroyed her home. Through the power of Queen Serenity and the Ginzuishou, she was reborn in the twentieth century as Tsukino Usagi.

When the Dark Kingdom rose again, talking cat Luna (put in suspended animation when the moon kingdom fell) sought a champion to find the reborn princess and reassemble the Sailor Senshi. She found her champion in Usagi. Not realizing Usagi was herself the lost princess, she gave her a magical brooch that allowed her to transform into the pretty sailor-suited soldier for love and justice, Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon's powers evolved over the five years the show was on the air, as did her personality. Originally a whining, clumsy, cowardly crybaby, she gained a tremendous inner strength and a powerful empathy for others...though she stayed clumsy. Her destructive powers faded into the background and she was portrayed more often as a redeemer figure, often sacrificing herself to save others and heal those who'd been turned to the side of evil.

Under certain circumstances she transforms into Princess Serenity. Her destiny is to become Neo-Queen Serenity, ruler of Crystal Tokyo. She now wields the Ginzuishou crystal.

I think hackwrench's identification of the Senshi with Chaos falls apart in two ways: the show stresses again and again and AGAIN the importance of teamwork over individual initiative (the bad guys fail because they can't work together) and at the end of the final season, Sailor Moon fights Chaos personified.

Sailor Moon is a highly successful shoujo (girl soldier) anime in Japan which was created due to the popularity of Naoko Takeuchi's highly popular serial manga which chronicles the adventures of a team of junior high students in short schoolgirl uniforms as they fight various evils that tend to periodically infiltrate metropolitan Tokyo. There are eighteen volumes in the manga series, each of which contains three to five episodes and are about 180 pages. Each of five separate storylines lasts for about three-and-a-half volumes. The anime ran for five seasons and spawned three motion pictures. The storylines are complex, spanning from a thousand years in the past to a thousand years in the future.

Sailor Moon is pretty unique in that it’s a kid’s show, and yet there’s all sorts of pretty mature content: for example: Chibi-Usa (Rini) has a pretty blatant Electra complex, people die left, right and center, Sailors Uranus and Neptune are romantically involved (although in the US dub they are laughably referred to as “cousins”), the three Sailor Starlights of season five are inexplicably dual-gendered (they're a boy band by day, girly evil-fighting trio by night), and Mamoru’s parents were killed in a pretty brutal auto accident, to name a few.

As I mentioned before, there are five separate storylines for each of the five seasons of the show. Each season of the show had a different name in Japan: Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon R, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon SuperS, and Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. If you click on the name of one of the seasons, you’ll get a pretty lengthy synopsis of the plot and the characters who are introduced (once I am able to post them all). The anime doesn’t always adhere to the plot of the manga; interesting exceptions will be noted.

While many of the links are broken, they are also proposed nodes. Existing nodes have been piped into this metanode, and it is a writing guide as much as it is an information resource. Please contribute as you see fit, and don't forget to /msg me.

Fundamentals: The Canons: Characters: Places and Things: Opinions, lyrics, et cetera:
Thank you, Naoko Takeuchi.

The most popular magical girl series ever (in or out of Japan). Based on the manga by Naoko Takeuchi; produced by Bandai in Japan and subbed by DIC for U.S. distribution. The first magical girl series in which the main character gets bad grades and starts out rather incompetent; before then, the heroine of any manga/anime series would rarely (if ever) be shown to be bad at school, and most magical girls start out unexperienced yet competent. Also, the first magical girl series with a team of magical girls, instead of the usual lone magical girl.

Since Quizro did a good writeup of the story in this node, and Phoebe Caulfield did a great one in the Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, I'll detail some of the differences between the Japanese and North American versions. Everyone who's seen the fansubbed version considers to original to be much superior to the dubbed version, and some people still pass around the fansub version, since it's considered to be so different from the dubbed version (people usually stop distributing a fansub once the North American rights have been bought).

First, the title. The Japanese title is "Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon", which literally translates as "Beautiful Girl Warrior Sailor Moon". However, DIC has translated this as "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon" (which would be "Kirei Heishi Sailor Moon" in Japanese). What's more, the characters were originally referred to as "Sailor Senshi" (Sailor Warriors), but in the dub are referred to as "Sailor Scouts". Warrior to soldier to scout... I guess DIC thought that, girls being non-violent, soldier would be better than warrior, and scout better than soldier, but it didn't seem to bother the girls in Japan...

Next, the character names. The Japanese names are listed family name first, given name second, the reverse of how they are listed in English (since they're already noded this way).

   Identity       Japanese Name  DIC names
--------------    -------------  ---------
Sailor Moon       Tsukino Usagi  Serena
Tuxedo Mask       Chiba Mamoru   Darien
Sailor Mercury    Mizuno Ami     Amy
Sailor Mars       Hino Rei       Raye
Sailor Jupiter    Kino Makoto    Lita
Sailor Venus      Aino Minako    Mina
Sailor Pluto      Meiou Setsuna  Trista
Sailor Uranus     Ten'ou Haruka  Amara
Sailor Neptune    Michiru Kaiou  Michelle
Sailor Saturn     Tomoe Hotaru   Hotaru
Sailor Mini-Moon  Chibi-Usa      Rini

"Rei" and "Raye" are pronounced the same. "Ami" and "Amy" are almost the same, but "Ami" is pronounced "ah-me", not "A-me"; "Amy" would be rendered a "Eimi" in Romanji. Chibi-Usa's real name is Usagi, but to avoid confusion she's called Chibi-Usa (Little Usagi); she is sometimes called "Little Lady" in the North American version. "Chibi" has nothing to do with "Chiba".

Next, some changes that were made due to censorship/marketing:

  • The villains Zoisite and Kunzite (Malachite) were originally gay. DIC turned Zoisite into a rather flat-chested woman.
  • Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were lovers in the original, but changed to cousins in the dub.
  • The original transformation sequences show some exposed breasts and lots of bare skin. In the dub, the breasts shots are removed, and for bare skin the body lines are removed but the shots left in, or it's removed entirely.
  • Panty shots and other straight-male oriented fan service are removed.
  • In the original series, all the Sailor Scouts are killed, and then revived. In the dub, the killing is edited out.
  • Miscellaneous violence is edited out: characters being slapped, Rini being spanked, Serena being strangled by a monster, and such.

Non-censorship changes:

  • All music, except for the opening sequence music, is changed.
  • The opening and ending sequences are changed.
  • All the dialog is rewritten, rather than being translated.
  • The "Sailor Says" bit tacked onto the end of each episode. FCC regulation 96-335 requires that TV stations broadcast three hours of educational material a week; evidently, tacking a moral onto the end of a cartoon is enough to trick the FCC into believing that's it's educational.
  • Zirconia was changed from a woman to a man, for apparently no good reason.
  • Some scenes are rearranged, and some episodes are removed entirely

My main source is the Sailor Moon FAQ, by Ken Arromdee, available at http://www.rahul.net/arromdee

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