Hopefully this is the first and only time I’ll stay awake at 3:00 a.m. to catch a Sailor Moon stream right when it’s made available, record it with Camtasia, and take caps of it with VLC.  It’s such a roundabout way of doing it.  On the other hand, I get to have my own personal copy for offline.  Choices.

I decided to go with the Crunchy stream simply because the nico quality was horrendous.  SO many people were on at the same time, and the fullscreen DID NOT GO COMPLETELY FULL SCREEN.  Unfortunately, this means I’m forced to watch through the advertisements that aren’t exactly placed in the best spots.

Fun fact: there are actually parts of that song I never heard in the cam footage leak.

We start the series off with a pan across the solar system, leading me to believe I went and streamed an episode of Nova instead.

After zooming in on Earth and its moon, there’s a glimpse of a kingdom.

And finally, a shot of two lovers about to kiss.

Predictably, this is all the dream of our heroine, Tsukino Usagi, a clumsy middleschooler with an unlikely hairstyle.

Rather than run into her true love, she trips over a cat.

Usagi removes the bandages on the cat’s forehead to reveal it has a crescent moon shaped mark on its head.

At school, we learn Usagi is kind of a poor student; she get a 30 on her last English test.  After daydreaming that she wouldn’t have to take tests if she were a princess, sudden advertisement.

During recess, Usagi learns about Sailor V from her classmates.  Who is Sailor V?  She’s a sailor-suited vigilante with a mask, and she just foiled a gang of jewelry robbers.

I know this series is going to be sticking close to the source material, but it would be an absolute dream if a LOT of Sailor V references made it in.  Maybe then we’d finally find out who Sailor V’s Boss is.  I’m crossing my fingers for Danburite.

Now that the topic is slightly related to jewelry, the girls decide they should go to a jewelry store owned by one of the girls’ (Naru’s) mother.

Of course, Usagi is in no position to buy any of that jewelry, but that’s a good thing considering they’re actually a plot by some demons to drain customers of their life energy.  Not like reality, where it’s just a plot by jewelers to drain customers of their money.

Outside the shop, Usagi bumps into a man dressed in a tuxedo.

Seriously.

One of my biggest hopes for the anime was that Usagi and Mamoru would have more chemistry than in the original anime, and this scene completely knocks it out of the park.  The original had the two constantly trading insults, and not even in a playful teasing way.  It was like they hated each other until they found out their secret identities, then decided to love each other.  The best way to develop this relationship now is for future episodes to have them bump into each other and actually engage in some playful teasing, and not the genuine stuff from the original.

Anyway, the guy in the tuxedo is near the jewelry store because he’s after the Legendary Silver Crystal, an item the bad guys are also after.  Does this mean he’s also a bad guy?  Pfft, yeah, no one with any self respect would even have that cross their mind.

Instead of jewelry, Usagi decides to spend money on the new Sailor V arcade game.  I would make a joke about how dated this is, but arcades actually still exist in Japan.

Usagi gets chewed out by her mother over her terrible test score, and she copes by falling asleep.  This results in her having another dream… only it’s not quite like her previous dreams…

When she wakes up, she sees the cat she helped earlier.  Only she can talk and calls herself Luna.  Naturally, she thinks she’s still dreaming, but then Luna gives her a brooch, which totally perks her up.  She then neglects to listen to Luna’s instructions to gather allies and defeat an evil organizing spreading out through Tokyo.

So Usagi transforms into Sailor Moon for the first time, and the CG animation actually looks a LOT better than it did during the leak.

Sailor Moon hears Naru’s cries through those red jewel thingies in her hair, and she rushes to save her.  Turns out, Naru’s mother isn’t her mother, but an evil demon.  Strangely enough, I clearly hear “Youma,” and the subtitles translate it as “Evil.”  So when someone says “The Youma,” it’s translated as “The Evil.”

And now we come to my biggest gripe of the episode: the Evil says… *ahem* nope, nope, can’t do it.  The Youma tells Naru that her mother is sleeping in the basement.  In the manga, the Youma tells Naru that her mother was in the basement so long that she must have starved to death.  She didn’t, but still… it’s a LOT more frightening hearing that your mother was replaced by a demon and your real mother MAY BE DEAD.

Meanwhile, the tuxedo guy enters through the window and is completely confused about the situation.

Sailor Moon arrives on the scene, but the Youma summons all the people she drained energy from to attack her.

Sailor Moon soon realizes she is in fact not dreaming and is at a complete loss over what to do.

Sailor Moon finally defeats the enemy with one attack, but disappointingly not by cutting it in half.

After the battle, she gets a glimpse of the would-be jewel thief who calls himself Tuxedo Mask.  I’m sure he just came up with that name on the fly.

But first, advertisement.

Anyway…

Little does Sailor Moon realize, she’s being stalked from afar.

The next day, Naru talks about the mysterious Sailor Moon that saved her, and Usagi re-realizes that it wasn’t all a dream.

Meanwhile, just outside we have a glimpse of Sailor Moon’s next ally.

And that’s the end of the first episode.

No Heart Moving.  I mean, the ending credit song isn’t bad, but it’s no Heart Moving.

So here’s the 20th anniversary memorial version of Heart Moving.

 

Overall, I was surprised at how good this was.  I was a little annoyed that we had lazy backgrounds where people were just frozen in place doing nothing while the foreground was active.  I could not tell if it was actual laziness or a throwback to 90s laziness.

On the other hand, the hand-painted backgrounds were a GREAT throwback and made for an entertaining style.

All in all, I am so glad Sailor Moon is back and more manga-accurate.  Neither the original anime nor the manga were perfect, but I’m willing to take all the bad with the good, because this is just amazing.