If you’re an anime fan you’ll probably notice a seemingly infinite number of Sailor Moon titles have crawled onto the shelves of video stores.
Last June, Cartoon Network managed to strike ratings gold by importing the much anticipated third season of the anime series Sailor Moon to the U.S., no less than five years after DiC’s initially unsuccessful attempt at marketing the first two seasons in syndication. For a number of years it was thought that the third season would never make it to the states due to some controversial content, but the people at Cloveway (who handled the dubbing and editing of the series) and the Cartoon Network stuck their heads out and managed to be richly rewarded.
Alas, not everyone was happy. For years anime fans have debated the qualities of subtitled and dubbed animation, but in general they tend to become rather irate when a domestic release strays too far from its Japanese roots. And, alas, that’s precisely what happened one fateful day when the series’ older viewers tuned in to find two ambiguously gay supporting characters, Haruka and Michiru (aka Amarah and Michelle) refer to each other as “cousins.”
Needless to say many fans weren’t particularly happy with this change as they couldn’t decide what was more offensive, the attempt at cutting out the two characters’ relationship, or the newly added implications of incest. In hindsight, the editing was a sad yet necessary move as the world just isn’t ready for a cartoon series with gay characters placed in a time slot where many children are likely to tune in. But the decision to make the two cousins was flat out stupid.
Meanwhile, as Cartoon Network and Cloveway (the U.S. branch of Japan’s Toie animation) were working to find a compromise to satisfy the series’ purist fans, DiC, the studio that first brought the series over to the US, had its own set of problems. Years ago Disney bought out the television animation company as a means of attaining the rights to a number of popular series, most noticeably the film rights to “Inspector Gadget.” However, the once predominant TV animation company had fallen through the cracks. Disney already had its own profitable television animation studio and the products DiC was churning out were proved to be substandard. The studio’s most recent release was an ill-received cartoon based on ABC’s “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” series. So the studio was placed on Disney’s chopping block and sold off. Lacking revenue, the studio sold off one of its few remaining viable properties. The first two seasons of Sailor Moon ended up falling into the hands of video distributor ADV Films who would later announce their plans to release all 65 of the episodes from the two season on home video.
Confused yet? ... It gets better. Pioneer animation had managed to attain the rights to the three-hour-long Sailor Moon films that were released theatrically in Japan for direct-to-video release, and produced their own dubbed and subtitled versions of the films for video release independent of Cloveway and DiC. So impressive were their efforts at getting the titles on the shelves that the executives at Cloveway hammered out a deal for distributing a video release of the TV episodes they had attained.
As of press, ADV is releasing the first two seasons of the show only on video in the dubbed and edited version that DiC had produced for television. Pioneer has released the films as well as the third (and eventually fourth) season in no less than four different formats. There is a dubbed and edited “as seen on TV” version aimed at younger viewers, “uncut” dubbed version that is essentially the same as the televised version but with the inclusion of scenes that were cut due to network standards and practices and uncut and subtitled video version complete with direct translations of the original Japanese dialogue. Finally there’s the DVD release which features option to watch both the dubbed and subtitled versions of the show. This feature is particularly nice for viewing the episodes dealing with gender issues, which suffered immensely in the dubbing process. For example, one episode features a subplot where Usagi (aka Serena) is concerned that her friend Makoto (aka Lita) may have a crush on Haruka (aka Amarah). In the dub release this was toned down to the point that the plot was changed so that Usagi was just worried about no longer being Makoto’s best friend.
The rights to the fifth season of the show are still up in the air.