About The Show

Usagi Tsukino (Serena in the U.S. version) is a cheerful but clumsy teenage crybaby. Nevertheless, she is fated to become Sailor Moon, leader of a team of brave girls: Ami (Amy/Mercury), Minako (Mina/Venus), Rei (Raye/Mars), and Makato (Lita/Jupiter). Collectively, they are known as the Sailor Warriors, of Sailor Scouts in the U.S. She meets a magical cat, Luna, and receives classic magical-girl items (including a wand and tiara) and superpowers to help her transform. In a past life, she was Moon Princess Serenity, beloved of Prince Endymion. That love will be reborn because Endymion has also been reincarnated as a human with the ability to magically transform into dashing hero (and occasional boy-damsel in distress) Tuxedo Kamen (Tuxedo Mask).
SM began as Codename Sailor V (1991, often confused with the unrelated Graduation spinoff Sailor Victory), a short-lived manga by Naoko Takeuchi in Run-Run magazine in which a teenage girl moonlights as a superhero wearing a distinctive sailor-style Japanese schoolgirl uniform. Rereleased as SM in Nakayoshi magazine as part of a cross-media promotion with the anime, the refashioned story now featured several color-coded heroines in the fashion of live-action team shows, as well as a supernatural spin -- lunar reincarnations would also crop up in its contemporaries Please Save My Earth and Bounty Dog. There are echoes of Power Rangers in the "monster-of-the-week" fight sequences in which our heroines take on even more outrageously costumed baddies, but the show is saved from banality by the strength of its plotting, its earnest, honest romance, and its refusal to talk down to its audience. With reincarnation a given, the show is unafraid of death; the first-season closes with a harrowing assault on the icy lair of Queen Beryl, in which the entire cast is killed off (albeit temporarily). Needless to say, the sanitized U.S. release unconvincingly pretends they have merely been detained elsewhere.
It is unlikely that many of the girls who watched the first season were still glued to their TV's by the last episode in 1996, a ratings disaster the producers attempted to avoid by rebranding and refashioning the series to entice younger audiences. As SM R[eturns] in 1993, it introduced new foes from the Black Moon, who intend to destroy present-day Tokyo in order to prevent the founding of Crystal Tokyo in the future. It also introduced Chibi-Usa (Rini), Serena and Endymion's future daughter, who time-travel to stay with the girl who is/was/will be her mother. Rebranded again as Kunihiko Ikuhara's SM S[uper] in 1994, it introduced the controversially homoerotic Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, who are in search of three mystic talismans. The talismans must be united to summon the Holy Grail, which is needed to locate the Messiah but must be kept out of the hands of Professor Tomoe and the Death Busters lest it summon the Dark Messiah. The new Sailors suspect (rightly) that Sailor Saturn is the Dark Messiah, splitting the group with in-fighting. By 1994's season SM S[uper] S (note the easy-to-confuse typography!), the focus of the show was gradually shifts away from Usagi and onto Chibi-Usa, thought to be more appealing to younger girls as the original target audience put childish things (i.e., merchandise) behind them. However, ratings hit an all-time low, partly because Chibi-Usa was unpopular, but also because Ikuhara's growing obsession with fairy tales and subtexts were lost on the target audience. Chibi-Usa befriends Pegasus, a flying horse, who enlists her help in keeping an important Golden Crystal from the evil Queen Nephrenia, leader of the Dead Moon Circus, who needs it to escape from her prison (inside a mirror) and conquer Earth. For the final season SM Sailor Stars, Chibi-Usa returns to the future, Mamoru leaves to study abroad, and the remaining Sailor Scouts must hold off Shadow Galactica, a group of evil Scouts led by Sailor Galaxia. They are aided in this by the Three Lights (aka Sailor Starlight), a boy band who can transform into leather-clad girls in times of need.
They were also several theatrical outings -- Ikuhara's Sailor Moon R (1993) takes place during the Nega Moon story in the TV series. An alien boy befriends the child who will grow up to be Tuxedo Mask, but, when they meet again as young adults, a misunderstanding leads to a tragedy. The same year saw his Make Up Sailor Senshi (aka Dreaming Moon), a short film of animated character biographies and gossip. Sailor Moon S The Movie (1994) focuses on Luna, Sailor Moon's feline friend, who is rescued by and falls in love with a young astronomer caught up in the battle to save Earth when evil Princess Kaguya plots to freeze it. Hiroki Chibata's Sailor Moon SS (1995) features Chibi-Usa's new friend, a modern-day Pied Piper, who leads all the local children toward a spaceship, and the Sailors must save them from being abducted. On the same bill was the short feature Ami-chan's First Love starring Sailor Mercury (always popular with the series' unexpectedly large audience of boys, because she did stuff with computers). The series was eventually brought to the U.S. with an indifferent dub, where it flopped, chiefly because it was shown at an insanely early time of the morning, edged into dead airtime by more powerful local interests. SM's failure was an object lesson in how a multimedia sensation, heavily reliant on merchandising tie-ins, can crash without adequate support -- Bandai would not make the same mistake with the later Pokemon. Much imitated in modern anime such as Wedding Peach, SM has also been the subject in erotic parodies in Venus Five and Sailor and the Seven Balls.

From: The Anime Encyclopedia