Oh, the rage I'm feeling

[firecat88]

Has anyone seen this article from the LA Times yet? I read it and, oh, the rage. For those who aren't familiar with Sailor Moon, let me point out a few things:

• 20 years ago this month, the original manga version of Sailor Moon was first published. The original Japanese version of the anime came either later in the year or a year after. I forget which.
• The English dub, from which this article is taking all the character names and the dreaded 'Scouts' term, did not get released until 1995.
• The English dub was, if you ask 90-95% of the fanbase, complete and utter dreck.
• The first season of the anime had 46 episodes, not 43. However, 5 episodes were cut from the English dub entirely and the two-part finale was squashed into one episode because they cut that much content out of both episodes that they were able to do that.
• "Supergirl meets Heidi Klum, with a stripper’s version of Shirley Temple fashions." is just really freakin' offensive. O.o

So, yes, I'm a bit unhappy. XD

[Chanlin]

Yeah quite a few of the comments on the article agree with you.

I confess to having been ignorant of the changes from the original until years later when I saw some eps of the Japanese version being run at a con.

[fireheart]

[*]The first season of the anime had 46 episodes, not 43. However, 5 episodes were cut from the English dub entirely and the two-part finale was squashed into one episode because they cut that much content out of both episodes that they were able to do that.

From memory, about 3 of the episodes that were cut were from the first 10 episodes. The ONLY reasons I can picture these episodes being cut were:

-Umino/Melvin flipping his teacher's skirt up.
-The boys generally being idiots.
-POSSIBLY the fortune-telling theme of that particular episode.
-The obsession with the Chanellas
-Abusing Luna. (it was kind of hard to cut out that, because the overall theme of the episode was based around just that. Serena/Usagi's brother gets scared of LUna, so he gets a chanella, but the chanellas are the work of Queen Beryl and so on)

One of them was marked as the "annual swimsuit episode" from memory.

www.smuncensored.com has a better listing of the cuts. My general dislike is:
(when the series first aired, I only got to see the first series and about half of the second, the remaining 2 seasons were aired on pay-TV which I don't have)

-Making Sailors Uranus and Neptune COUSINS. WHY?!?!?!?!
-Gender changes for absolutely NO reason.
Now Zoicite I could understand, since he/she dresses as Sailor Moon at one point and does look kinda feminine anyway, Fish Eye I could SORT of understand (although they COMPLETELY mangled one scene where Fish Eye goes topless) because he/she cross-dresses a LOT in the series, but there were two that I could not understand: one was important to the plot, the other was just strange.

Ziroconia had a gender change from female to male for zero reason, which COMPLETELY ruined the plot towards the end of that series (in the anime, Zirconia was meant to be the old form of Queen Nehellenia, who wanted the Golden Dream mirror so she could stay beautiful forever or something like that).

The other gender change was of a character that Chibiusa/Rini met. In the anime, it's meant to be a boy who cross-dresses and Chibiusa/Rini has a bit of a crush on (he/she wears a female kimono and dresses in a sailor fuku at the end of the episode) who also hosts a tea ceremony. In the dub, it's changed into a woman, but the whole "Chibiusa/Rini has a crush on them" remains....,basically creating a lesbian relationship where one didn't exist before despite TRYING to cut out the Sailor Uranus/Neptune thing.

Anyway, onto other gripes about the series:

-Attack name inconsistencies. Now from Japanese to English I can somewhat understand. But then we get five different names for the SAME ATTACK. (from memory, one of Sailor VEnus's attacks was labelled "Venus Love Chain Encircle (the "correct" name), but also wound up being labelled "Venus Love Chain Harness" "Venus Love Chain Whip" and so on)

and that's all I can think of about now.

[Chanlin]

Something I remember occurred to me some time back about the edits to the dub. I think they tried to make it like a GI Joe type cartoon for girls.