Sailor Moon (1992)



Episodes: 1-46

Scouts: Sailor Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter & Venus.

Enemies: Queen Beryl, Queen Metallia, Konsite, Zoisite, Nephrite, Jadeite, and the countless demonic subordinates.


The purpose of this season was to a)give some kind of background to the whole series and b)to get everyone between the ages 6-14 hopelessly addicted. Worked on me, anyway. It's a great season and well worth watching, perhaps moreso than any of the others, and it has a fantastic plot....


At the outset, Usagi runs the business single-handed but over the first 30 episodes she brings together her predestined group, in the order given above. Ami is the first to be discovered, via a memorable incident involving a disk and an arcade ... Rei soon follows, as does Makoto. Minako finally shows up about 10 episodes before the end of the season having left England to live in Tokyo. They are given their attack techniques and general purpose in life by Luna, the worryingly organised cat who looks after Usagi. Basically, they're told whenever a monster jumps out and starts sucking the life out of a nearby friend, show it the dimensional door. In order to do this, they'll need the help of a certain Silver Crystal, a couple of plot-lines and a twenty minute script every day. What else could an anime fan ask for?


They soon get the hang of it and literally pulverise the unfortunate first demons sent down to fight them by Beryl. The general structure of these surreal battles is that the Sailors happen to stumble upon whoever it is causing trouble and use their magic to transform into the Scouts, or 'Sailor Senshi', as they are often referred to by those fans who think they are professors of Japanese. Once they have made their presence known, they use their various techniques to distract the offending party until Sailor Moon remembers to use her Moon Staff and send them back to wherever they came from.


While the intrepid girls are fighting against the efforts of Konsite, Zoisite, Nephrite and Jadeite, the enemies are in turn fighting and plotting against each other in their quest to thieve the silver crystal and achieve global domination. The charmers. They launch offensives in the form of Exorcist-style possessions (no, its not that serious), evil-inducing make-up and food and, obviously, random attacks on the scouts and other people. The runts always get rumbled in the end, though and the scouts are rarely faced with much of a challenge throughout this season, except perhaps the showdown in the last couple of episodes.



When Konsite and Zoisite make off with Sailor Moon's favourite piece of jewellery in one of the concluding episodes, there is a penultimate punch-up in the Tokyo Tower and Zoisite tries to kill Tuxedo (Mamoru) so that Beryl can have him for herself . He appears to succeed and Sailor Moon starts bawling, when the strangely obedient crystals return to her and transforms her into Princess Serenity, allowing her to save the day and look quite funky. One of the crystal shards flies into her estranged boyfriend who is captured and slung into a cage at the enemy's HQ. The scouts, meanwhile, soon discover that this HQ is under the North Pole. They are soon caught by the comically smug Konsite, who sends them in to the oblivion of time, but with little success. Instead of landing in the stone age, the scouts find themselves on the moon and have the past of their quest revealed to them. They remember how Usagi was a Princess at one point when Beryl launched an Akira-style wave of destruction on their palace and surroundings, amongst other fond childhood memories.

After they have been sent back to fight Beryl by Usagi's mother, they all pile into the HQ for a royal rumble. This is where the 'glitch' comes in. Of course, they win but there is one little problem....'Oh my God! They killed Ami, Rei, Mako and Minako!' Yes, I'm afraid 'they' did just that. As you'd expect, the episode is directed with the intention of stirring some emotion, but this seems a little inept when you look at the precedent, to put it politely.


As any animation fan should know, you can't just leave a series when four of the main characters have been 'whacked'. Unsurprising therefore, that in that same year, TOEI released the follow-up series...