6/21/2007 - Moon Revenge

Is it wrong for a grown man to admit that he's watched Sailor Moon? Well, if Jedite can do it, so will I. Here was the situation: back in the mid-90's there was a serious lack of quality animation on the airwaves. Aside from the Marvel and DC cartoons, there was mainly kiddie stuff like the cartoons produced by Disney. Being a big fan of Robotech, I was intrigued by the stuff coming out of Japan. I had watched some anime movies like Akira and Fist of the North Star, but I was really hungering for an anime series I could get into.

Enter DIC, a U.S.-based animation company that saw its heyday in the late eighties. Apparently, they saw that there was a vast untapped demographic that they could appeal to: young girls or "tweens" as we call them today. Instead of coming up with their own cartoon, they decided to take the semi-lazy route and translate an already existing cartoon from overseas and put in English-dubbing. The cartoon they picked was Sailor Moon.

Without knowing the original Japanese source material, I had thought that the English dub that DIC did was pretty good. I know they had to have changed the names, but I thought that made sense. I mean, do you think American girls would identify with a girl named Usagi? Some of the finer plot points seemed weird, but I was too caught up in the action and the great animation to really nitpick it.

It turns out, though, that DIC did a horrible translating job. They censored a lot from the original source material, mostly cartoon violence and some implied homosexuality. Sailor Moon in Japan was really geared more to the adult crowd, so a lot of this risqué stuff was the norm over there. That was DIC's real mistake... trying to aim for a demographic using material never meant for that audience.

So if you're going to watch Sailor Moon, your best bet is to watch the original Japanese version. The voice acting is a lot better, there's no censorship, and the music is GREAT. Just take a look at this clip, for example. They way they synchronize the action of the animation to the background music is something you definitely won't see in American cartoons. They even have different "singers" sing as the different Sailor Scouts recall their memories with Sailor Moon. That's just awesome.