When my friend posted the following link to my Facebook wall, anyone who knows me well knows that I could have died happy after reading it (as long as I got to watch everything in Heaven):

http://www.fandompost.com/2014/05/16/viz-to-release-remastered-uncut-sailor-moon-sailor-moon-crystal/

I watched the trailer on that page, too. Finally being able to own DVDs of high-quality original Japanese Sailor Moon episodes? Being able to start watching it on Hulu starting on my 25th birthday? Plus: my husband gets to watch it with me and know and appreciate the show. Hell, I like to remind myself that I couldn't have married anyone else I've ever met because I needed to be with someone who was open to watching Sailor Moon one day. But I digress.

I had heard about the BRAND NEW Sailor Moon anime coming out that was going to be more based on the manga! Yes!! The manga is so good! I mean I still love the old anime, but having a new anime that follows the manga's story more closely is so good. Now, they need to do it with Soul Eater.

AND AND AND!!!!!! A NEW ENGLISH DUB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY CRAP I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE THE DAY!

*breathes*

OK. Anyone who knows me well knows this:

I loved Sailor Moon ever since I was 5 years old and I saw a Sailor Moon toy commercial for the first time. I can't find the damn commercial on YouTube but oh well. Point is, I was enamored by the idea of superhero girls named after planets who kicked bad guy butt. I guess I was a feminist in blooming? Runs in the family I think. I blame my aunt.

I remember being in second grade and being in school while Sailor Moon was on TV. It was on at 2:30 in the afternoon every weekday, and I was always in school until at least 3. I remember watching the clock every afternoon, and would be excited when 2:30 hit because Sailor Moon was on, but sad because I never got to watch it.

Finally, when I was in fourth grade, Sailor Moon became a regular show on Toonami. So every day at 4:00, my mom would let me take a break from homework and I would watch Sailor Moon. Every day. This was part of my routine until Sailor Moon stopped airing on Toonami a few years later. I managed to be able to catch all of the dubbed episodes eventually, and I was able to see Sailor Moon S and SuperS when they were dubbed for the first time, too.

I remember being in fifth grade, and I had an older cousin in 8th grade who liked Sailor Moon too. Her best friend (a guy) also really liked Sailor Moon, and they got to talk about the Japanese version and how cool it was and how it was so much better than the English version. I knew that the English version said some dumb things, and that was always a bit embarrassing, but it was the best that I had to watch, so I kept with it. My favorite planet of the Solar System was Saturn at the time, and my cousin's friend printed off some pictures of Sailor Saturn for me and wrote up little descriptions of what she's like! I wish I still had it.

I got bullied a lot, though, by some of the boys in my class. The worst thing that ever happened regarding that was I had drawn and colored in a picture of ALL of the Sailor Senshi (or Sailor Scouts as I knew of them at the time). I felt so cool drawing the Sailor Scouts that hadn't been released in North America yet (Sailor Moon S came out when I was in sixth grade). Anyways, I left the drawing on my desk toward the end of the day to do my "chore" to help clean up the classroom, and some of the boys had taken my drawing to the sink, turned on the faucet, and drenched my drawing in water and ruined it! I was beyond devastated.

Sailor Moon had stopped airing on TV for the most part by the time Sailor Moon SuperS was finished. I had heard that they weren't going to dub Stars, which I thought was dumb, but I wasn't too disappointed by that. I knew that I would probably be able to watch the Japanese version one day.

And because of the wonders of the Internet, and because of a website that no longer exists because it broke a lot of copyright laws (anyone remember a site called TV Links? No? Am I that old? lol) with some assistance from YouTube, I managed to get a hold of all 200 Japanese episodes of Sailor Moon.

Boy, was I convinced of how much better the Japanese version was. I remember watching some comparison videos of the two, and I became angry at how much butchering they did to the Sailor Moon dub just to appease American child audiences.

I can only find a comparison video of half of an episode these days, but if anyone wants to take the time to find out exactly what these differences are, there is a website called www.smuncensored.com that goes through all of the episodes that were dubbed into English and points out the changes that were made to each episode. No one really updates the site anymore but I am super impressed that people took the time to mark all of these differences so that people like me don't have to.

Basically, what's wrong with the original English version in a nutshell:

-much of the script was completely rewritten, and many of these rewrites include changes in character and plot. Not to mention that they make the characters talk like stupid valley girls half the time, and much of their vocabulary includes extremely dated vernacular that does not age well at all.

-there was tons of censorship, and while that's not necessarily the fault of the people who were dubbing the show (Americans have stricter rules about what can be shown on kids' TV, after all), and at the time of the dubbing, it was generally believed that cartoons were primarily for children so in order for Sailor Moon to sell, it needed to be marketed to children... but sometimes, they really went out of their way to censor over nothing. Also, some of the worst cases of censorship are just plain insulting to the original work. They make really emotional scenes not very emotional at all just because it's not appropriate for children to know about death and sadness? I could get in a debate about that, but yeah, that mindset just irritates me in general and I wish that they dubbers didn't feel the need to go out of their way to censor as much of the show as they could.

-LittleKuriboh made this word popular in Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series when Yugi and the gang went up against the staff of 4Kids: LOCALIZATION. Cutting references to the fact that Sailor Moon is a Japanese show (but not cutting all of it? yeah sometimes they never cut Japanese lettering) and "Americanizing" it as much as possible was the game they played.

-I'm gonna get a lot of shit for this, but I'm going to say it anyways. Most of the voices. SUCK. INCLUDING Sailor Moon herself. I know that dubbies LURV TERRI HAWKES OMG SHE'S THE BEST SHE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN VOICE SAILOR MOON but honestly, not a fan. Terri Hawkes made Sailor Moon sound super ditzy and like a valley girl with some sass and it's like... no. It completely changes Sailor Moon's original character to make her like that. Terri was decent with her acting so it's not like she was horrible or anything, but who honestly thought that it was a good idea for Sailor Moon to scream with a vibrato? Seriously.

-Oh wait other voices that suck. Luna. Sounds like an 80 year old British woman. Which, she isn't. It's one thing to listen to her talk in her cat form, but when you watch the Sailor Moon S movie and you see her young-looking human body with that voice? It sounds COMPLETELY off. Tuxedo Mask's voice is OK but his acting is pretty terrible. Amy's voice doesn't really sound like a teenager's at all, and trust me, I've met a lot of teenage girls and I haven't met one who sounds like that (I'm talking more about the DiC Amy, the Cloverway one was better but not by a lot). I appreciate that Susan Roman was dedicated to the show enough to voice Lita/Sailor Jupiter for the whole thing but I don't really like the "butch" factor that she gives the character. Rini's first voice grates my ears (but her Cloverway voice is the best the whole series! STEPHANIE BEARD FOR THE NEW DUB PLEASE? Maybe?). Nephlite is TERRIBLE - I heard one sentence today and I was done forever. Molly is obnoxious. Zoisite, Emerald, and Fish Eye all have the EXACT same voice actress and it's SUPER obvious (I just read that she died a few months ago from lung cancer? Dang that sucks). Same goes for Queen Serenity, Sailor Moon's mom, and Sailor Neptune. Those women didn't even try to make the voices more varied - did they just assume that the kids watching the show wouldn't notice or care? Who knows. Apparently the woman who voices Zoisite et al voiced a few other characters too who I didn't notice, so she could make her voice more varied, she just... didn't.

-the characters are way bitchier in the dub than they are in the Japanese version. I read the manga when I was in middle school and character descriptions said that Sailor Moon and Sailor Mars were best friends. I was incredibly confused when I read that, because I only remember the two of them yelling at each other - I didn't think that they liked each other at all!! But then I watched the Japanese version, and then I thought, "Oh... I see it now..." Way to go, dub. Ruining character development and relationships for the sake of gags and laughs. Classy.

-Sailor Moon Says. Think Sonic Says, but none of them were good enough to become an Internet meme, and they include lots of awkward pauses and the morals are ridiculously forced. I specifically remember one that said, "Queen Beryl did a terrible thing by destroying the Moon Kingdom. But we need to take care of our planet by recycling and shit." I wish they actually said "recycling and shit" because that's hilarious. I'm just too funny sometimes.

OK. I think you get the idea.

Now to the main reason why I decided to login and write this blog post today.

When the new Sailor Moon Crystal anime premiered a couple of Saturdays ago, I was reading people's comments about what they thought of it. I thought that it was very well-done, I enjoyed the return of Usagi's seiyuu, and I had the manga with me to compare the show and the manga side-by-side, and let me tell you, it is 95% the same. The new anime is almost literally an animated version of the manga.

But I read so many SCATHING reviews from people who watched it. Usually along the lines of, "It's not like the original!" (and by original they mean the English dub that they grew up with) or "The art sucks!" or "The plot moves too quickly!" (they never read the manga). I think that the Facebook group I follow deleted a lot of the negative reviews because I couldn't find any specific ones anymore, otherwise I'd give some examples. Point is, their opinions were based off the fact that they had little to no experience with the source material of what they were watching. They just wanted more of the old English dub that they grew up with.

I read more comments today regarding the NEW English dub of the original anime. If I thought the reviews from earlier were scathing, well, I don't really know what scathing means. These were worse:

"I'm incredibly disappointed with the remastered series... But that's just the inner 6 yr old me crying inside.. I wish they would have stuck closer with the original voice actors rather than these people.. It's pretty bad. Oh well, I'll stick to the old original dub thank you!"

"The new voices have ruined this for me. I will not be buying it and I LOVE Sailor Moon. I am heartbroken."

"This is just a big pile of NO. In the original english dub Luna's accent made her sound older & more mature. She is supposed to be watching after the girls & now she just sounds like one of them."

Stuff like this permeated the comments on the video clips that we saw for the new dub. And for what it's worth, I thought that it was pretty great. Fortunately there were some people who were similar-minded to me. This particular post sums it up pretty well:

"I don't think they got the memo. They are completely stuck in the past. I mean if you listen to the original Japanese voices, they are not far off at all. The old 90s voices are and some were extremely horrible. I watched it as a kid and I admit, it will take sometime to get used to the new voices, but im excited. And to see everyone bitch so much over something like this, is so stupid. They obviously don't know that much about the original Japanese version. I mean seriously don't watch it if you don't like it. Watch in Japanese or the old cut up shit but bitching and whining people are doing, is annoying as fuck."

I bolded two parts for emphasis.

It's a little like reading comments from Gen 1 MLP fans saying that the new show (Friendship is Magic) is terrible because of little nit-picky things that aren't *supposed* to be a certain way according to them.

Actually wait. It's worse.

It's more like if fans of the Gen 3.5 cartoon came on this forum to complain about Friendship is Magic because Friendship is Magic is nothing like the "original" (which, in their minds, original means Gen 3.5, not Gen 1).

I was pretty angry this morning when I read all those comments. I was actually offended.

I do not really understand how people could feel that they have a right to an opinion over something they clearly have little knowledge of. These are people who call themselves huge Sailor Moon fans without understanding the source material of the new content that's coming out. It bothers me, too, when dub fans insinuate that the dub is the "original." No, the dub is not the original. The dub is a hacked and slashed version of a show that added filler and personality changes (the anime) to its original source material (the manga).

Just because something is original TO YOU, it doesn't mean that it's the "original." I don't understand why people think that they have authority in their opinion when it is not very well-researched nor do they have anything to say when trying to respond to people who disagree with them.

I'm not saying that these people aren't allowed to like the old English dub. They can like whatever the hell they want.

But can people admit that maybe they like something because of nostalgia, and NOT because it is actually high-quality?

I have seen some people here and there saying that they were "petitioning" to get Terri Hawkes to voice Sailor Moon in the redub. Do they not understand the purpose of the redub? Why would they think that it was going to be more of the same that they grew up with? I'm afraid that I don't quite understand.

We as Friendship is Magic fans are in a bit of an interesting position, I know, too. Because I think that a lot of bronies get a lot of flack for hating the old gens, or at least some of the old gens. It's a little different here, though, because people dislike the old gens of MLP for being "too girly" aka not having a broad enough audience in mind, whereas people hate the Sailor Moon English dub because it DOESN'T pay much mind to the original source material.

I think, though, that despite those differences, we are in similar positions, because we have people who try to dismiss our dislike. I once had a dub lover tell me, "Don't be a hater. Without the dub you wouldn't have gotten into Sailor Moon, and it wouldn't have gotten popular in the states." I think that old MLP fans can say the same thing about the older gens.

While what the person said about it not becoming popular is true, I don't think that excuses the mistakes that were made while originally dubbing the show. Just because it was better for a show to be dubbed poorly than not at all, it doesn't mean that the poorly dubbed version is the best version of the dub that could possibly exist. Because people scrutinized the old dub, we will be getting a newer, better dub. And I know that not everyone will think that the new dub will be better. But based off the clips that I saw this morning, it is going to stay as true to the original source material as it possibly can. Heck, it already advertised that it would be uncut and uncensored. Pretty sure that they are keeping the Japanese music and original sound effects. So already, it is going to be better just because they are trying to keep it true to the original source material rather than try to hack the show into pieces and market the show as something that it's not.

Hating is stupid, and getting angry over CHANGE and DIFFERENT FROM MY CHILDHOOD is a waste of time. I don't think that being different from what you grew up with is a valid reason to hate something. If you can be negative about something over something as trivial as your own nostalgia, then it's your loss.

I just think that it sucks that there are others who identify as Sailor Moon fans who will decide to hate the new material and to cling to the past. It would be so much more fun being in a fandom where people learned to adapt.