I love Sailormoon.  It's reponsible for my love of anime and fed pretty directly to my Utena fandom, which in turn was responsible for a significant part of my direction in life.  Hell, I was one of those losers who signed the "Save Our Sailors" petition back in the day.   

My old fansubs are long since decayed and trashed.  Still, I'm not really sure if I personally would re-invest in watching or buying that series.  If we're generous and post each box set at $40, most of the old-school Sailormoon fans I know have either bought the series on VHS or the DVD releases a long time ago and I can't imagine them dropping over $200 for more Sailormoon or even watching all 200 episodes again.

If Funimation wants to make a Sailormoon remaster work, they'd really have to work on trying to bring in new fans -- targeting kids and teens, Internet streaming, etc. and bringing new blood to the franchise.  I don't think playing to nostalgia would pay off.

On the other end, though, if we have Sailormoon, Penguindrum and Utena all on the market simultaneously, Ikuhara's bank account might start to get pretty flush.  Here's to hoping he shoots up to rock-star status again and makes another U.S. con tour to cash in on that.

Last edited by dirufacade (08-16-2011 11:19:18 PM)

Oh yeah, CPM's SKU dvds were freaking awesome compared to the abysmal quality of the ADV & Pioneer DVD releases of of BSSM.  Tin can audio, VHS fansub quality video...it's bad.  The R2 DVDs are a bit better (I'm seriously tempted to play the audio of the R2s on my PC while showing the video with subs of the Pioneer release of S on my TV just to avoid the tin can.)

the_architect wrote:

They did the same for their release of Evangelion Platinum back in 2008, and it sure looked sharper and less grainy than the Japanese Renewal masters it was based on. Of course, a few fans I knew actually preferred the grainy look of the original...

Film grain is not a visual defect. Not directing this at you, just pointing it out.

There may be some grey area when it comes to traditional cel-based animation: are you intending to present the film at the cel level - as Disney does with their HD masters, or at the presentational level - which would have been struck on film (up until the turn of the century or so anyway) and thus have grain in its presentation as intended.

This is one of my major pet peeves in the HD era, where so many people don't seem to understand what film grain is and is not. Scrubbing it away does not make the picture "better". Often times when a film is scrubbed of every last speck of grain, fine detail goes away with it. In many cases the use of film over digital is an artistic choice and the graininess of the image is how the director and cinematographer want their images to be seen.

Sorry for the off-topic, but this is just one of those film topics that pushes my buttons.

TL;DR If the Japanese masters of Eva Platinum with more apparent film grain are what Hideaki Anno wanted us to see, that is the version I want to watch.

Last edited by Imaginary Bad Bug (08-19-2011 02:10:18 PM)

Imaginary Bad Bug wrote:

Sorry for the off-topic, but this is just one of those film topics that pushes my buttons.

TL;DR If the Japanese masters of Eva Platinum with more apparent film grain are what Hideaki Anno wanted us to see, that is the version I want to watch.

Oh, sure, no problem. Perhaps I've worded that phrase poorly, I wasn't suggesting that the "scrubbed" version is actually "better" than the original. Technically, it's an encoding tradeoff, especially in the case of older media such as DVDs.

It's just that in the case of Eva I suspect that the film and process decisions had more to do with the technical (and budget) limitations they hit during the production and the endless re-editing they did after the original release rather than Anno's vision. As a result, we have a few episodes in the remasters where the level of detail and "grainess" (please excuse the horrible term) varies abruptly in the same scene. Feel free to disagree, obviously.

Also, the transfer of the Japanese masters for Renewal (the edition which became Platinum in the Western world) aren't exactly perfect, as they have a few of the deinterlacing and aliasing problems we've also seen in the remaster of Utena. Unfortunately, they're a lot more noticeable in the case of SKU, and I'm far too sensitive to them

Again, sorry for the OT...

The manga is being released this week. I'm pretty excited but the Sailor Moon fans got a sneak peek on the contents of the manga and they're not very pleased about it, that's for sure. They're going fan rage over the re-releases. Sure there were a few errors, but that won't stop me from buying it...if Madman is willing to sell it into Australia; for now there is no release of the Sailor Moon manga from their website, which really sucks.

For now, our anime shop in the city is buying the manga from the US so we might not get it within a few days

Last edited by Maya-chan (09-12-2011 06:39:19 AM)

Sorry, I just found out that someone already beat me to this news on another topic.

I saw the first ep of the remake, too!

One thing that really caught my attention was the fact that they really do seem to intend to stick to the manga's plot, which I really like. There're good parts to the original anime, too, but I've always been interested in how the manga version of the story would look if animated.

Looking forward to next week's episode!

crystalwren wrote:

I'm kind of meh, to be honest. I love the new character designs. They're gorgeous. But the transformation scene took forever, the music is substandard, and they're keeping those stupid fucking bows in Usagi's hair when she sleeps. The animation quality is merely acceptable. Overall, it's a B- for me.

Understood. That transformation scene was heinous,  something about the proportions seemed off, and that may just be the wild camera angles and random CG. I haven't decided how I feel about the animation yet, nor the pacing. For me, I'll need a couple more episodes before I can weigh in. I am enjoying the manga to anime feel of it though. There were always a few things about the manga I wished were represented in the anime, and one of those things was the utter creepiness of manga monsters.... it was like Naoko Takeuchi could conjure up the most menacing, maniacal baddies with a few stray scribbles. I feel like that was well represented in Crystal. Another thing I've always wanted to see animated was Sailor Jupiter's 'Coconut Cyclone'. I'm hoping that becomes a thing.like seriously you got no idea... um....lets see... Idk what the current plans for Crystal are, but I'd really really REALLY like to see a Cyborg Hotaru wayyyyyy down the line, since she's my favorite. I'm really hoping SMC will showcase the fact that the senshi powers are not all specific attacks, and that Mamoru has quite a few tricks up his sleeves....and his own nude transformation. I was kind of hoping for that ill fitting sailor fuku look Sailor Moon starts out with, she literally can not fill the shoes of a Sailor Senshi....

crystalwren wrote:

but the transformation scene took forever

I honestly fast forwarded just to see this, and jesus it's way too long. I'm wondering if it was like this the first time around, but will be a shorter version in subsequent episodes. Like Panty and Stocking.

As for the bows, believe me when your hair is long you do all kinds of stupid shit to keep it from choking you to death in your sleep.

I did catch the rose framed characters. Was that in the original at all? I'm pretty sure there's a precedent pre-SKU for framing characters in roses, I keep wanting to say RoV or Brother, Dear Brother.

Giovanna wrote:

crystalwren wrote:

but the transformation scene took forever

I honestly fast forwarded just to see this, and jesus it's way too long. I'm wondering if it was like this the first time around, but will be a shorter version in subsequent episodes. Like Panty and Stocking.

I hope that they won't do the transformation sequence every episode. The original one took about 40 seconds, and the new one took a whole minute, so that's 20 seconds of extra movements in the 2014 version.

One thing I did not really like about the new transformation sequence was how they made it sorta-3D, the figure kinda looked like IMVU characters :|a

I'm kinda not sure how they fucked up the transformation sequence. But it seems to me like there's a huge fanservice factor there. Give them MORE Usagi saying she'll Justice you in the name of the MOON or whatever. Give them HUGE TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCE, because that's the part where everyone loses their shit and starts cheering.

Sailor Moon is cheesy as hell compared to modern anime. The outfits are dorky, she's dorky. It's kind of the problem of Sailor Moon being one of the first to do it, but we've been to exposed to the next generation efforts such that SM is dated. I feel like they realize that and their decision is to go with making it SO RETRO and keeping all of the things that do date it. Even utilizing them to an excess.

In Japan is this supposed to attract a new crowd of young girls (like MLP reboot) or is it being more marketed to adult fans of the original? (Uh...like MLP reboot?)

I am going to chime in and say that I actually liked the transformation.  It had just the right amount of CGI.