Sailor Moon Season 1

Many years ago the universe was at peace but the universe's enemy, the negaverse, was unhappy with this and tried to destroy the moon kingdom, the set of power in the universe . The queen of the moon kingdom, Serenity, defeated the negaverse by capturing their greatest warriors in crystals and scattering them on earth. She also sent her own daughter, Serena, as well as her court to earth so that they would escape the destruction of the moon kingdom and would live to see another day. Unfortunately they would forget ever having lived on the moon kingdom and everything having to do with their past lives. Queen Serenity also sent two cats to earth to find and protect her daughter and the sailor scouts (each princesses of their respective planets who serve the moon) and reawaken them if the negaverse were ever to strike again.

The idea of this show is really imaginative and inspiring. That some random and slightly flawed girl on earth is the princess of the universe and is the earth's principle warrior to fight against evil. The problem, for me at least, is that Serena is such a weak heroine. She can't do anything on her own, and when she is faced with even the slightest hardship she breaks down crying. She's always whining and is never even slightly interested in protecting anyone or fighting anything. She runs from evil more than she fights from it. And as if that isn't enough, when the other sailor scouts don't come to her defence, or when they are all defeated, some random guy they don't know throws a flower at the bad guy and everything is better. Not only can she not fight her own battles, even though she is the protector of the universe she needs a man to come rescue her from the bad guy. This is a horrible role model. In the beginning I thought that maybe she would only start out this way and would slowly grow stronger with each episode, but she doesn't. The sailor scouts are a bit more mature than Sailor Moon is, and even comment on this several times, but they are still boy-crazy and squabble a lot. The villans are also pretty bad. They could've killed the scouts many times over if they just killed them themselves instead of sending these weak minions. If the cat wasn't there the Sailor Moon would've died many times over.

Despite all of this, I still don't mind watching the show. The last episode or two was pretty good and kind of made up for the rest of the season by putting it into perspective, if only the whole show was like that. It's sort of qualifies as a guilty pleasure show I guess. The transforming and twirling are fun to watch in all of the girly glory, and those parts in particular made me really love the fact that this is a good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation and not cgi. Don't get me wrong I enjoy the cg every now and again, but I still love the older animation style.

So while I don't particularly enjoy some of the personality traits presented here, the show is still fun to watch. And at the end of each episode there's a small 'sailor says' segment where Serena says some moral or other about treating people well or saving the environment. And to give credit to the show I watched the US dubbed version which sort of ripped off the original Japanese version by cutting out scenes or whole episodes and changing some of the language to suit a younger audience. I know the same thing has happened to a lot of shows, Cardcaptors and Anne of Green Gables for instance were changed to suit US tv. So I'll give the show the benefit of the doubt and that the original is better than the US version. But a good show regardless.