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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1992
Closing in on the midpoint of this lightweight personal tour of anime, I’ve also got to a title I first saw mere years after it had premiered in Japan. Sailor Moon showed up on TV over here just when I was leaving for university (I have an impression I might have caught a glimpse of it in the last days before leaving, even if I’m a little concerned about the possibility of “reconstructing memory for the sake of making a point.”) After joining the anime club at university and trying to follow online discussions about anime (overwhelmed by everything everyone else already knew and had experienced, I kept retreating to the safer haven of a “Robotech Mailing List”), though, it was easy enough to run into complaints about the multifold compromises of adaptation. There were digs at Sailor Moon on a club poster that fall and in a show video segment (“I think we’ve been punished enough”), but by the end of my time at university things had got to the point of a special “short adventure” being tossed into another show. Years after that, I did manage to get past “I am not in the target demographic for this” and watch the original series, although I’ve never managed to move on from there to the “Sailor Moon R” episodes I recall having seen other glimpses of back on TV.
After having sampled three different “magical girl” series from previous decades in this month, I remain ready to see the “superheroine battles” of Sailor Moon as something new (although Minky Momo’s transformation sequence did get me thinking of the later series in more than one way...) So far as “altogether new” goes, though, references to a different magical warrior named “Sailor V” in the first episode still feel just a little peculiar. (I eventually got to the point of reading the original manga with its Sailor V prelude, and still might not have understood things altogether there.) As ever, the heroine Usagi starting off not quite a role model in either form gets my attention, but that does leave me cautious about “making assumptions about ‘entertainment for girls’ and ‘Japan itself’ from an outsider’s limited perspective.” The matter of “maybe she remains a taste you have to acquire” might be just a tiny bit safer to try and deal with.
After having sampled three different “magical girl” series from previous decades in this month, I remain ready to see the “superheroine battles” of Sailor Moon as something new (although Minky Momo’s transformation sequence did get me thinking of the later series in more than one way...) So far as “altogether new” goes, though, references to a different magical warrior named “Sailor V” in the first episode still feel just a little peculiar. (I eventually got to the point of reading the original manga with its Sailor V prelude, and still might not have understood things altogether there.) As ever, the heroine Usagi starting off not quite a role model in either form gets my attention, but that does leave me cautious about “making assumptions about ‘entertainment for girls’ and ‘Japan itself’ from an outsider’s limited perspective.” The matter of “maybe she remains a taste you have to acquire” might be just a tiny bit safer to try and deal with.