Sailor Moon factoids!

For those of you not aware, Sailor Moon Crystal will be premiering this Friday, July 5th. Most of you will probably remember the anime from when they were kids and quite a few of you already know the trivia behind the show but there are a few things for those of you who haven't really done there research.

In the original manga/anime, Sailor Moon's civilian name is Usagi. 

It was pretty common to change the names of anime characters in the 90's when they were being localized. I can't be too picky about this though since Anime culture was just starting in the US and the localization team thought that kids wouldn't understand the cultural differences. Originally her name was Usagi, which literally translated from Japanese means bunny. She was named this because of her double pig tails. Fun fact, two of my favorite fictional characters are named Usagi. 

Although this Usagi is a little more bad ass. 

The original leader of the Sailor Scouts was Sailor Venus

One of the common themes of the Sailor Moon franchise was reincarnation. All of the planetary sailor scouts were actually reincarnated from a previous life. In fact, most of them already had there sailor powers in there past life. That is except for Sailor Moon. You see, Usagi was never meant to be a sailor scout, she was meant to be the future queen of the Moon Kingdom. Sailor Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Venus were tasked with being the princesses body guards and Sailor Venus was the head commander. 

In fact, she kind of still is in the Manga. While technically the team answers to Sailor Moon, when she's gone or has gone bonkers for her man, it's Sailor Venus who steps up and gives the orders. She was even the one to kill Queen Beryl. 

Sailor Neptune and Uranus were lesbians in the original version of the story. 

If you didn't know about this one, then you've been living under a rock. 

Sailor Saturn never had a transformation sequence in the anime!

As a person who loves transformation sequences, I was super pissed about this. If they were to fix one thing in Crystal, it has to be this. The closest we got was one that was featured in the video games and it sucked. It's not even worth putting it up. 

Season 5 of the anime was never originally translated

Season 5 was actually a little weird in that it flipped the Sailor Moon universe on its head. This season introduced a bunch of new sailor scouts. The three big ones were the Sailor Starlights. In the manga, they posed as a male pop group. In the anime though, they weren't just cross dressing. They literally swapped parts when they transformed. 

THEY'RE JUST SO DAMN SASSY!

This season also introduced the idea of Sailor Scouts as the enemy. Below you can see some of the major villains.

Iron Mouse

Tin Nyanko

Lead Crow

Aluminum Siren

And the Queen bitch Galaxia

The anime went a little crazy with it though, each time the enemy stole a star seed from a human, I'm not going to explain what a star seed is here, they would transform into a sailor scout monster. My favorite was Sailor Guts.

His attacks were all sweat based.

Final thoughts

I have always been a huge fan of Sailor Moon so I hope this gets you excited for the new show coming out. For those of you who don't know, the manga have been re released and you can buy them here and here. They are also streaming the original anime on Hulu and there are even plans to redub the original series to closer resemble the original language. With that, I leave you with one last video, a compilation of all the anime transformation sequences.

There is still a lot I didn't mention. If you have a factoid you would like to share, please leave it in the comments and as always, share with your friends.