SABAN SAILOR MOON:
What If...?
Picture it. The present, and with it the start of the kid's fall line-up. Of course, you're probably too old for the Saturday morning cartoons, even if you do watch it when no one's around. Or maybe you're watching it with your kids, or little sisters and brothers.
However you end up watching it, it's 9:00 am, sharp. The Power Ranger Hour on ABC Family has passed, and as you and your kids switch the channel over to the original ABC Channel. The screen lights up with dazzling flashing lights and images of planets, and the face of up-and-coming star Keisha Castle-Hughes appears, a smile on her face. She's joined by four other girls, each of various ages and races - aside from the New Zealander Keisha, one of the girls is black, and one is from Russia - and even physical disabilities, as one of the remaining girls is known to have Down syndrome. They all start to dance, before a CGI sequence transforms them into their secret alter egoes.....the Sailor Scouts.
Welcome to the eleventh season of Saban Presents Sailor Moon. It started out as the "sister" to Power Rangers, and it was limping along on Fox for its first two seasons. However, upon an aggressive marketing scheme in 1997, which utilized K*B Toy Stores as a partner, and a change in the line-up to include younger actresses, Saban managed to turn the struggling franchise into a million dollar cash-cow. Even the switchover to Disney hasn't affected it; in fact, Disney took such a liking to the show that it's been casting a lot of big names onto the show to its benefit, and putting it in a prime slot on Saturday morning, touting it as "The Next Big Thing" and "The Starting Point for Starlets". Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff, Amanda Byrnes, Raven Symone - all of these girls and more have, at one point, been a castmember before going on to bigger and better things.
While obviously not as comparable as the Power Rangers in its heyday, it is still a steady hit in the ratings and in merchandising, and it can be counted on during sweeps and the Christmas season. Indeed, this year Disney announced they were finally putting together seasonal sets for the show, and the first season would be out in time for Christmas - a prize which diehard hans have been clamoring for since the turn of the millennium. There's the production of a fourth Sailor Moon movie, with Geena Davis and Adrian Bardo returning and reprising their roles as Black Spectra and Queen Beryl, respectively. It is slated to come out sometime in 2007. There's even talk of finally bringing the original anime show that started the Saban series to America, though many fans have yet to signal their enthusiasm for such a release and many parent groups have said that they preferred the Saban version over the much more mature, much naughtier, much more violent anime. Families for America have even threatened to boycott the show and write to the FCC over such a release, due to the original anime having gay characters in it.
But none of that matters to you at this very moment. You just want to watch the show, and you do as it introduces the new villain Xenonia and the Anti-Girl Group, and shifts over to the new group of girls talking to their predecessors as they hand over their transformsing items, with the original Sailor Moon- now Princess Serenity,all grown up and living on the New Moon Kingdom - looking on. At the sight of her, you fondly recall the Christmas where you got a Sailor Moon figurine and a Sailor Mars Sail Boardr© from your parents. You played with them straight on til the next June with your local Sailor Scout Club, comprised of your elementary school friends with such super alias as Sparkle Girl and Moon Patty. You have those toys somewhere in the attic, and as you watch the faces of the little ones light up at the cool special effects (technology's changed considerably in ten years!), you actually consider bringing it down for them and playing alongside their cat figurines against their light up eight-season Sailor Uranus doll.
Golly, you think as you feel that guilty pleasure gland swell up inside, as the five girls talk about some good old-fashioned American video games. Where would I be without this?
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Of course you know this never happened. Here we are, in 2006, and Saban Presents Sailor Moon is nothing more than a two minute trailer that played back in 1995, to an audience of booing fans. Heavily circulated on the Internet, it is reviled as an example of the negative effects of Americanizing television shows to meet a particular status quo. In the case of Sailor Moon, the Saban version was doubly criticized as another hokey attempt to capitalize on the Power Ranger craze of the early-to-mid 1990's.
Is it possible, though, that Saban Sailor Moon may have been successful in the United States...and possibly elsewhere? My answer is....maybe. It depends. For several reasons:
1. The footage we all know so well was from the pilot episode. Pilot episodes, particularly those of live action shows, are sometimes notorious for sometimes having nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the series - mainly because their purpose is to convince a network to pick them up. Because of this, pilots can be very hastily done, and a lot of times, ideas and people who appear in the pilot disappear to suit the needs of the show and/or the networks if it gets picked up.
One example which immediately comes to mind is the pilot episode for that great series, The Golden Girls. You know, the one with Coco the gay cook. The one where Blanche was married to a man named George Hollingsworth. To those who know the series well enough, both of those facts were applicable only to the pilot, because they were either changed (in the case of Blanche's last name, which became her maiden name) or removed (in the case of Coco, who disappeared and was never heard from again).
Obviously, the problem with pilots is that it's the make-or-break episode for a series. If it shows potential despite various odds, such as a tight budget (which Saban Sailor Moon had), limited time (which Saban Sailor Moon again had) and a decent cast (which, from the trailer, we cannot really ascertain) or even a decent pitch, chances are, it would be picked up. In terms of Saban Sailor Moon, though, the pilot was not being shown to a network, but to rights holders, though one could say that the overall idea of convincing them to pick the show up was the same.
If Saban Sailor Moon was ultimately allowed to go on, therefore, chances are, the budget would have increased considerably to get more out of the show. In time, the pitfalls of the pilot may have been all but forgotten, save for those who purchased the first season on DVD.
2. Sailor Moon caused the anime third wave. Well, maybe it's a little overblown to say that it was the only thing that caused it. But it was certainly a large factor, as many of those girls and boys who curiously turned on their TVs at 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning have gone on to become some of the anime's long-standing - and most loyal - fans. Some of the luckier American fans have been in on the anime since its beginnings in Japan, but in either case, there is a large bloc of fans who have been fans for over ten years - which, in many cases, is literally half a lifetime. Certainly, without their writing to game magazines and anime magazines about the abrupt cancellation of Sailor Moon, and even without (dare I say it?) Save Our Sailors, Sailor Moon - and perhaps, a lot of the anime that came after - would have floundered on the air.
This isn't to say that anime wouldn't have gone on into the United States in the way it has. Sailor Moon fans didn't force Studio Ghilbi to do Mononoke. Sailor Moon fans didn't put out the rumor that Pikachu will give your three year old an epileptic seizure (because it is a rumor...). On the other hand, the exposure came earlier than the seminal year 1998, and Sailor Moon helped open up anime to a new group of people, right alongside Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball Z, however, wasn't cancelled. It was Sailor Moon's cancellation that caused people to look up from their newspapers and go "Hmm, what's this now...?"
So, Saban Sailor Moon would have had a clear playing field had it gone on, because it was the alternative to dubbing the anime. And without its anime counterpart cluttering up the waves, and with all of the Sailor Moon wannabes such as Tenko being cancelled, it would have likely gotten their target demographic at a much better level than the anime did. The fans may or may not have been as loyal as the anime fans are - certain American television shows have that tendancy to create a certain type of fan base to the exclusion of most viewers (Dukes of Hazzard, anyone?) It certainly would have suffered wth the arrival of Pokemon and the "revelation" that it was based off of what seemed to be a far better quality anime show, among other things. But if the cards were played right by Saban and Bandai, the show might have survived past the new millennium - just as Power Rangers has, despite it's detractors.
3. As hinted to above, Saban and Bandai are good for each other. Like it or not, admit it or not, without Saban, Bandai would not have gotten the foothold in the US that it got. Without Saban repackaging the original product to make it more friendly to American audiences, we wouldn't have wanted all those neat Megazord toys or Red Ranger figures. Power Rangers wouldn't have been a billion dollar market - it would have stayed a sentai mainstay in Japan, under its original name, Super Sentai. But it would not have been the windfall that it became, and it would not ultimately have the fanbase it has due to the Americanized Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It is more than possible that the same effect could have been applied to Saban's Sailor Moon.
Could it have worked for Sailor Moon as well? The comparison to how merchandise did in real life is telling - Sailor Moon merchandise did not do very well in the United States. There was little in ways of marketing (I myself have only seen two toy commercials for Sailor Moon in eleven years) and the variety of products for Sailor Moon in the US were slim to none until 1999, and even with Irwin at the helm, the toys could be somewhat difficult to find in big chain stores. While Sailor Moon was a multi-million dollar merchandise powerhouse in Japan, in the United States it was barely even touched upon. DiC was a cartoon show franchise, not a savvy toymaker.
Compare that to Power Ranger merchandise, which is still on shelves a plenty, or, for something in anime, Pokemon (which goes into the astronomical when comparing it to Sailor Moon sales in the United States). With Bandai and Saban working together, we may have gotten that Sailor Mars Sail Board as a top-selling toy in the Christmas season.
4. There's nothing wrong with live-action/anaimation mixed media. After all, one of my favorite movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, was just that, and it was quite successful. And I doubt there are many people who can give a straight face and say that they didn't like Space Jam, the Looney Tunes/Michael Jordan release.
Certainly, if there was a time for Saban Sailor Moon to flourish, it would have been in the mid-1990s. Toy Story had just come out, yes, but such movies were not guaranteed to be a consistent success. Not only was Pixar the only proven maker of full-CGI animated movies at that time, but such an endeavor was costly and time consuming. The renduring of one human character - Sid - took over nine months. Even partially CGI'ed movies were risky - for example, the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame had one climactic scene with Quasimodo holding Esmeralda at the top of the church tower, over hundreds of CGI figures. This twenty second scene nearly caused a blackout of the entire Disney animation complex in Orlando due to all the data!
Nevertheless, certain kinds of CGI could be used rather effectively, without such time constraints or risks posed by the aformentioned two movies. The type used for Saban Sailor Moon was called "Toasters", an older type of rendering system which was obstensibly being used with several shows at the time (Reboot, perhaps?), which was then blended into the 2D animation. As the technology became better, the animation would have as well. And again, as the pilot episode, it was more than likely that the animation alone would have been much better in subsequent episodes. Even so, there were a few CGI'ed shots which, the quality of the taping aside, did look to have some potential. Finally, for most shows with CGI, the risk and hard work normally seemed to pay off in this time, especially after Toy Story came out. So why not try the approach with Saban Sailor Moon, which, in this case, could have easily been a pioneer in that type of programming, even with its live action sequences? It would be like watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit all over again....but with girls.
Indeed, in the alternate Saban universe, when the live action show came out in 2003 in Japan, there were comparisons of the CGI quality between the Saban version and the new Toei version. Given that Toon Makers - the people responsible for the pilot episode - ultiumately became the sole responsible party for the CGI sequences up until 2001, when it teamed up with Pixar (!), even for the Japanese audiences who rarely got to see the Saban version, there was no question which had the better treatment.
5. American sensibilities would have encouraged Saban Sailor Moon. And why not? After all, everyone knows that Amara and Michelle are cousins, Zoicite was a girl, and there is absolutely no nudity in Sailor Moon whatsoever.....
Obviously, the point I'm getting at is that, by scrapping the anime and making a new series, Saban Sailor Moon would not have to deal with all of the knotty (and naughty) little problems that parents - and the FCC - would have potentially raised red flags for. If you've ever gone to SMUncensored.com, you know that the amount of edits and changed to the first two seasons alone could border on the utterly ridiculous. But our society is such that these were the changes felt neccessary to keep our kids minds out of the gutters, and also not influence them to dress up, or look under women's dresses, or become gay. Or, in some cases, the edits were to please the censors and to adhere to time contraints. As a result, anime in America is highly censored when it comes to television; in syndication and cable, there is no instance of an anime left uncensored. (I can still recall Sci-Fi Channel's Saturday Morning Anime, where I learned upon purchasing the originals that they edited every single anime they showed!) Of course, America isn't the only country to heavily censor, but it is certainly notorious for it.
Of course, I've also noticed a hypocritical double standard in this. Unlike anime, which has to be changed and edited to be "acceptable", a lot of American shows can get away with sexual innuendos and themes that most anime shown cannot get away with - because it strives to be acceptable for "all ages". So perhaps (and this is a big perhaps, since Power Rangers certainly hasn't been without complaints on anything) if Saban had ultimately gotten the rights to Sailor Moon, we may have seen more of what we know from the original - some of the playful banter between Haruka and Michiru, perhaps, or the arrival of the Sailor Starlights.
Because in Saban Sailor Moon, the Starlights obviously don't have the type of trouble that they get in Italy, where a psychologist claims that they make boys gay, or in America, where similar fears may also apply if it were ever released. In this version, they're always girls, and Seiya's love for Usagi is transformed into an obsessive but generally harmless hero worship. Some parent groups accuse ther show of promoting lesbianism, but it is ultimately left alone because Seiya (or in this case, "Sarah") says to Serena in one important episode, "You're the greatest hero in the universe, and everyone admires you for it. All I want is to be just like you, and be all that I can be, so I can be the second greatest hero in the universe!" This, in the minds of the censors, removes all doubts of homosexuality.
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For for all those reasons, however, despite all of the possibilities that may have come from the idea of Saban Sailor Moon, it was grounded before it even got started. By the time the pilot was finished, a deal was already being made by Bandai and Toei....with DiC, who ultimately went on to dub the first two seasons of the original anime, to the general chagrin of fans who would become more intimate with the original. Nevertheless, the anime became a "big" show in America, though nothing like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z. Its voice actors came and went, the third and fourth seasons were dubbed, and held generally good ratings on Cartoon Network. To this day, the dub is available to the American public, as is the original, uncut Japanese series, though the chances to buy the DVDs have dwindled consierably since nearly all of the American rights reverted back to Toei - and with it, the ability to make merchandise for the American fan base.
What of the Saban pilot? To this day, it has never been released unedited - Toon Makers turned it over to Bandai and Toei, who has sat on it to this day. All we have is the music video trailer shown at conventions, and ultimately posted on the Internet. It has generally been ridiculed and reviled - in part because of the quality of the animation, in part because of the theme music, and certainly in part because of the cast chosen to be the live action actresses, such as the wheelchair-bound sailor. As a result, Saban Sailor Moon has become one of the skeletons in the closet of the Sailor Moon fandom - there are no websites dedicated to it, not fanfiction written about it. No one even knows who the actresses are, and most people do not care to know. In terms of Sailor Moon as a whole, for America, Saban Sailor Moon is a sad little footnote, a might have been that thankfully wasn't.
Just remember, though, the next time you decide to ridicule Saban Sailor Moon, that it could have been a lot different. Stranger things have happened, and who knows, it could have been a big success. And that laughable Sailor Mars Sail Board© just might have been in your attic after all.