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Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon is a Japanese TV animation starring an average Tokyo highschool girl who hides a secret identity as the magical superheroine "Sailor Moon". The "Bishoujo Senshi" in the title means "Pretty (or Beautiful) Soldier". Sailor Moon's motto is, "For love and justice, I am the sailor-suited pretty soldier, Sailor Moon!" Her superpowers stem from being the reincarnated Princess of the Moon from an ancient lunar civilization. Sailor Moon's human identify is Tsukino Usagi (Japanese order), and she has a group of friends who are also Sailor Soldiers, all named for the planets of the Solar System. Together with her team of female warriors, Sailor Moon saves Earth and the universe from powerful supervillains intent on destroying the beauty and life found there. The show was based on a girls' manga (comicbook), and focuses on the power of love and the characters' ability to face down obstacles thru personal strength and teamwork.
The show ran for five years and each year featured a new, more powerful enemy with a different plan for destroying the Earth/universe/galaxy. Quite literally the battle is between the forces of light (the Sailor Soldiers) and darkness (the villains generally want to pitch the universe into oblivion or "turn" the Earth to the dark side). In each season the Sailor Soldiers must become stronger through a series of power-ups as they defeat increasingly powerful minions, until they face the head villain in a final showdown. Since the seasons are quite long (around 40 eps each), most episodes feature minor character development without contributing significantly to the seasonal story arc. These regular slice-of-life episodes can be quite enjoyable and amusing, and tide the viewer over until the climactic battle episodes show up. Mid-season is when things start to heat up, and at the end of the season when it all goes down. In this way the anime differs from the manga, in which the action never lets up and always continues to build towards the climax.
In total 200 episodes, three movies and a handful of specials were produced for the Sailor Moon anime. Episode summaries are available at The Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Encyclopedia and Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon Anime & Manga.
There are five Sailor Moon series in total (each year is a new series):
A Sailor Moon movie appear in theatre during "R", "S" and "SuperS". Each was 60 minutes long and was paired with a short 20 minute special which aired before the movie. The movies are standalone stories which take place at an unspecific point during the year:
Sailor Moon was created for young girls but has also attracted a much older audience than is usual for mahou shoujo or "magical girl" anime. Perhaps this is because it combines the magical girl genre, so popular in girls' manga, together with the sentai (fighting team) genre. Significantly, the TV show was the first girls' anime to appear in North America, and it sparked a new generation of mainstream anime fans. Both the anime and manga have enjoyed great success internationally, throughout Asia, Europe, South America, and North America. Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon aired at 7pm Saturdays from March 1992-February 1997 in Japan and is currently rerunning on Japanese television. It debuted in North America in 1995 dubbed in English, and continues to air here periodically, although the broadcast TV version was heavily rewritten. Other international versions stayed closer to the original version.
A faithful and accurate translation of the first four seasons, with the original dialogue, music and characterization, was eventually released in English on DVD. Unfortunately all the international licenses were revoked in 2004 and by 2005 the Region 1 DVDs were no longer in print. It is highly unlikely that any North American companies will relicense any of the Sailor Moon anime, due to its age and lack of interest. The final season, SailorStars, was never officially released in English but was fansubtitled by the Canadian fansubber VKLL. He has ceased distribution of SailorStars as of spring 2006, however other reputable fansub distributors may still supply them; they were originally distributed as VHS and then as DVD. There are also digisubs available thru Bit Torrent: Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Digisubs, Sailor Moon SuperS Ami-chan no Hatsukoi Special.
There are many bootleg box sets of Sailor Moon floating around: although they are cheap, they are of terrible quality. Don't let the shiny covers of bootleg box sets fool you: the video quality and subtitle quality is very poor, full of sentence fragments and terrible translations from Chinese to English; sometimes there aren't any English subtitles despite claims by the seller. There are no legally produced Sailor Stars DVDs with English subtitles. Any you see being sold are likely bootleg; it is against fansub ethics to sell fansubs for profit. See this eBay Guide to Spotting Bootleg Sailor Moon & Other Anime DVDs.
Here are the covers of the officially licensed English DVDs. They all have Japanese and English language tracks and English subtitles only. Do not buy any DVD box sets that have different languages or subtitles or a different number of discs shown in these sets.
A very popular stage musical version of Sailor Moon has run every year from 1993 to January 2005. Visit Wikipedia for an introduction to the wonderful world of "SeraMyu".
A live action series based loosely on the first story arc of the manga aired in Japan from October 2003 to September 2004. This successfully revived interest in the series and contributed a new telling of the story and characters to the Sailor Moon universe. This series is officially known in Japan as both Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, however it is usually referred to by the latter name. It is unknown why the Japanese creators switched from calling the senshi "soldiers" to "guardians" since that is not the actual meaning. The story is a retelling of the battle with the Dark Kingdom. It starts off as a close adaptation of the manga, but after the first few episodes it quickly diverges into its own storyline with new characters, items, and plot twists. PGSM is a quirky blend of magical girl and sentai shows, with action and effects very reminiscent of the original Japanese Power Rangers. It's campy but has a lot of heart. The choice to keep the actresses' natural hair color while in their "civilian" forms and use wigs when they transform made the concept of blond- and blue-haired Japanese girls plausible. The costumes, which are based on the manga, were also done quite well. Thanks to the internet, the show's actresses have developed quite a fan following outside of Japan, with numerous fansites springing up to showcase their solo and PGSM-related CDs, photobooks, and cute merchandise. Fansubtitled episodes of the entire series (49 episodes plus two DVD specials) can be downloaded from various places: see Links. Visit Wikipedia to learn more.
The Sailor Moon anime is based on a manga (comicbook) series which was published concurrently with the broadcast of the TV show from 1992-1997. The manga was originally published in the monthly girls' manga anthology Nakayoshi ("Best Friend") and then collected into volumes called tankoubon. The manga has been translated into numerous languages, however the English edition is out of print as of June 2005. Visit my sister site Manga Style! to learn more.
There is a Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon entry in the publically-editable Wikipedia and there is also a dedicated Sailor Moon community wiki called Project WikiMoon.