Exploring The Sailor Moon Iceberg

0:01 [Music] we need to talk about something interesting all right I probably shouldn't have to do an intro for this one I think you know what you're getting into here either you're a big Sailor Moon fan who's gonna understand a couple of these at least or you're one of those crazy people that likes listening to an iceberg video for a fandom that you have no affinity for in either case I hope I can make it interesting we'll be exploring the Sailor Moon Iceberg as compiled by my friend Amanda who you can find over at sailor [ __ ] post on Tumblr hey everybody my name is Amanda and I'm the person who made the iceberg meme that this video is based on thanks so much to Kai for taking the time to make a video about it as it so happens right around a special time too because if all goes as planned this video should go up right around the 31st anniversary of

0:52 Sailor Moon's very first appearance in nakayoshi Magazine on December 28 1991 happy birthday Sailor Moon I myself though I claim to be somewhat of an expert in the magical girl space in the Sailor Moon fandom do not all know all of these and had to look them up but overall I think this iceberg is a pretty great purview of at least the Western Sailor Moon fandom and it's my hope and expectation that even the most die-hard of Sailor Moon fans might learn something so as we get into it I would encourage you not only to subscribe but also check out all the other content that me and the creator of this Iceberg Amanda have done that's on this channel related to Sailor Moon including our top 10 episodes and my magical girl tier list video where we rank every season of Sailor Moon also there will either be a complete list of references in the description or a link

1:40 to a Google doc if all the references don't even fit down there so let's get started with no further Ado we have about a hundred different entries to go through and a lot of things to say the tip of the iceberg our first entry is the very popular Sailor Moon redraw challenge this was a viral Trend that began in mid-2019 and really hit its stride around May 2020 featuring different artists drawing one single frame from Sailor Moon s episode 125 originally just one Korean artist's attempt to redraw the frame it turned into just about as viral a sensation as you could possibly get featuring Renditions and art styles and crossovers for just about anything you could possibly imagine to the point where I would honestly be surprised if anybody who is

2:27 tuned in enough to see this video hasn't seen this meme Deke dub changes it may seem pretty funny and foreign nowadays but back in the mid to late 90s when Sailor Moon was first being localized to English the landscape for children's cartoons was quite a bit different this forced the Canadian company Deke who was localizing the anime into English to make a number of suspect changes this included every thing from renaming characters to adding morality segments at the end of every episode to drastically cutting out anything that even suggested sexuality or violence to literally editing in seat belts to never even dubbing the fifth and final season of the show because of the well stuff we'll get to later while it's now one of the canonical examples of boulderizing a anime

3:14 for Western audiences I can't say that it didn't have its own sort of quirky wild charm nauru is an energy battery this I believe refers to much of the first and second season when usagi's friend nauru is often targeted by the bad guys and sort of this nebulous and ominous way while it's obviously just a way to raise the stakes for a personal attachment to usagi it does come across as a little odd that this one random not special girl has a ton of potential energy to be sucked shouldn't shouldn't say it like that that sounds bad it's also a real bummer that Nar dies at art of Sailor Moon s at least she'll always have the chocolate parfaits anime mamaru is a college student this refers to one of the more famous changes that the show made and one that

4:04 hasn't aged quite so well in the manga mamaru is a high school student so his relationship with the final year middle school and eventually first year high school student usagi doesn't seem as weird as he's canonically 16 years old however the television anime made him into I believe his first year in college studying engineering aging him up another two years and making it a bit less digestible wooby naoko myth this is in reference to one of those image macros that gets shared around every so often the idea that Sailor Moon Creator now code Takeuchi was somehow bullied or struggling or upset and not in a good place when she created Sailor Moon woobie is a term for this type of security blanket in a fictional space you usually in the form of a self-insert

4:53 character while I can certainly understand why this was shared and propagated it is completely apocryphal and in no way true whatsoever in fact nalco has a graduate degree in chemistry and is a licensed pharmacist her manga Works were very quickly adapted for publication so there was little time for her to be a struggling artist and she most certainly has never claimed to have been one even in the very few years before she became a millionaire Italian Starlight censorship the Sailor Starlights are a group of three sailor soldiers from beyond our solar system who come to Earth in the fifth and final season of Sailor Moon they are notoriously controversial because while on Earth they choose to take male bodied forms reverting to a female body when transformed the

5:44 show in general has barely one line about it over the entire season but I think you can understand how that may be somewhat object actionable content to certain people around the world especially back in the 1990s of course the Italians while they do love their magical girls shows not as big on the transgender issues back in the day however instead of Simply refusing to dub the fifth season as the Americans and Canadians did they instead made the Sailor Starlights always present as male and then they simply switch places with their identical twin sister during the fight scenes the explanation of course from an Italian psychologist uh Sailor Moon made young boys become homosexual which I guess missed me and many others stupid sexy Saya Marco albiero art

6:31 Marco Albero is an Italian artist born in 1981 who has a fantastically singular and unique ability to replicate many of the animation Styles and stills from the early 1990s he ascended from fan artists who in fact official artist when his art was used on the re-releases of Sailor Moon in the late Arts Sailor Moon Monopoly Saint Seiya guess who this guy star gentle uterus speaking of the Sailor Starlights sailor star makers only attack name is star gentle uterus that's correct much like the other attacks in the show ranging from Mars flame sniper to Coconut Cyclone to shine Aqua illusion

7:20 the different characters call out their different attack names in what has become a Trope of the genre these can oftentimes be pretty funny because they often use ingrish in pretty bad translations as is the case with star gentle uterus while not something anyone would ever say in English I bet it sounds pretty cool to a Japanese speaker and if there's ever anybody who is canonically uncool it is taiki lgbtq plus love Sailor Moon Sailor Moon as it turns out was a pretty socially Progressive show for its time incorporating many different genders and sexualities in a somewhat positive representation that you wouldn't see anywhere else especially not in children's media as

8:06 such it should come as no surprise that the entire franchise is fondly remembered and beloved by many of those who found some sort of representation among the extended cast of the show I would also wager that there's some aspect of aesthetic quality here but I'm spitballing and that's for another video essay Nostalgia Critic The Nostalgia Critic is a review comedy web series on YouTube created and directed by and starring comedian Douglas Walker he goes through various old media properties and gives them some sort of context and gets angry at them it's very funny I'm told well the only one I've seen is his review of Sailor Moon which is one of the most blatantly under-researched and offensive pieces of criticism that I've ever seen in my days he makes no attempt

8:54 to fundamentally understand the appeal of Sailor Moon and it's very clear that he only watched the first couple episodes I would highly recommend never watching this review it offends me both as a fan and as a Critic and many people have rightly burned him for it bad Crystal animation Sailor Moon Crystal was a 20th anniversary remake of the Sailor Moon anime there was much hype upon its release but unfortunately toei animation who was in charge of the production decided to Outsource it to their uh let's say the second stringers in the Philippines on top of that they proceeded to not pay them very well and rushed the entire production resulting in some of the worst quality screenshots that you ever did see hang in there Sailor Mars nalco mixed up Pluto and

9:40 Saturn's mythology this is kind of a long-standing one that you may have recognized if you have ever seen the show and have a bit of background on our solar system generally the sizes of the Sailor soldiers match up with the sizes of their respective planets they are also introduced with the first four coming in called the inner soldiers first and then going outward the exception to both of these metrics are Sailor Saturn and Sailor Pluto with Sailor Saturn being exceptionally small distant discovered much later after all the other soldiers and generally branded as an outsider conversely Sailor Pluto is the next Sailor Scout introduced after Sailor Jupiter and she's just a touch shorter than Sailor Jupiter furthermore your Greek and Roman myths would tell you that Saturn

10:27 in Kronos is the god of time and Pluto slash Hades being the god of death it seems a bit odd that Takeuchi would mix these up considering she was in the astrology Club at school and this is not very hard information to find and there's also a large argument that I've read going into the Greek and Roman symbology and everything else regarding their designs that kind of indicates that she knew what she was doing ahead of time either way the jury's still out but it does feel a bit odd supers rape metaphors this refers to the generic monster of the day conflict from the fourth season of Sailor Moon Sailor Moon supers in this season the dead Moon circus is searching for Pegasus who has taken to hiding in someone's pure dreams what this manifests in in each episode is

11:13 one of the characters being Shackled and bound as one of the bad guys makes a I'm trying to describe this and it sounds really dumb just saying it makes a dream mirror appear from them and then as the character in question is screaming forcibly shoves their head into the mirror to survey their dream for Pegasus I'm sure you can see how it would probably be very easy to read this as a sexual assault and yeah it's pretty much just as uncomfortable watching it as it was me telling you about it Sailor Moon drops Sailor Moon drops was a match 3 puzzle video game for mobile devices that was popular around 2016 when it first premiered it ran for about four years until it was eventually shut down I have spoken with a number of people that quite enjoyed it but to me it just seemed

12:03 like another Match 3 phone game above the surface nalco's fashion inspiration the clothing in Sailor Moon is often very interesting especially in the original manga this is because now code Takeuchi was a big fan of the particularly French fashion industry in the late 80s and early 90s meaning that you can see the Sailor soldiers wearing some pretty pricey High Fashions such as Chanel and others in her art sailor crystals this is the plot McGuffin from the fifth and final Arc of Sailor Moon in the 90s anime they are considered the true star of seeds that the star Guardians have that grant them their powers as sailor soldiers and all of this lore is pretty wibbly

12:49 wobbly and different a bit in the manga and the only thing you really need to know for enjoying the show is that sailor Galaxia is looking to collect all of the Sailor crystals cats human forms keeping with the extended lore theme from our previous entry here we have of the notion that The Talking Cats Luna and Artemis and later Diana are indeed aliens from Mao yeah Mao who actually do have human-like forms you can see these in Sailor Moon Crystal I believe in the Eternal movie as well as in the manga however the only time we see a cat's human form in the original run of Sailor Moon is in the Sailor Moon s movie when we see Luna's human form they're very much a

13:34 Takeuchi thing and which is why you see them in the things where Takeuchi was the most involved such as the Sailor Moon s movie and Sailor Moon Crystal tuxedo Melvin this is the name of the 32nd episode of Sailor Moon in the first season and it stars largely overlooked and forgotten character umino who in the Deep dub was named Melvin Melvin tries to cosplay as tuxedo masks for most of the episode in order to protect nauru it's also really interesting for what it says thematically about built the protector role and how it foils the relationship usagi has with Tuxedo Mask but also it's just really funny to see zoicide fooled by tuxedo Melvin Saban Moon before Sailor Moon was first localized to English there was indeed a pitch to have Sailor Moon instead be localized as

14:26 an entirely new partially live action TV show only the pilot episode was ever made and thankfully it never was picked up and the original show was dubbed instead however that meant the original pilot has since become lost media and while the community in general knew about it from some shaky cam footage and a panel back in Anime Expo in 1995 the true story behind Saban Moon had never really come to light that was until March of 2022 when YouTuber Ray Mona did a full-length documentary with investigative reporting that fully details everything about this crazy Confluence of Sailor Moon That Never Was I'd encourage you all to go watch the documentary nauru figured out sailor Moon's identity at some point the character of nauru as previously mentioned is tied in

15:16 pretty closely to Sailor Moon in the first two seasons she has a number of episodes encountering different aspects of the enemies of Sailor Moon including her mother being turned into the monster of the day and pulling an entirely Power of Love redeems Trope on nephrite in the first season as well but I think the clearest example of the fact that nauru figured out that usagi is Sailor Moon comes from episode 87 in Sailor Moon R right before the climax when there is this gorgeous scene whereby naaru confronts usagi and asks her to share her burden with her this is functionally naru's Swan Song and she's written out of the show largely except for a few cameos in later Seasons but I would say the primary reading of this scene is that Naru understands usagi is a superhero in

16:05 some degree season 1's ending upset children this refers to episode 45 and 46 of Sailor Moon that's the ending to season one the events of these two episodes are heavily dramatic and feature much death and sacrifice and they're crafted with an expertise that led me and Amanda to put them as some of our favorite episodes of all time to say that they had an emotional impact on children is a bit of an understatement they have an emotional impact on adults as well and still do after re-watching them many times however I would assume this chart is directly referring to the reception of these episodes airing in Japan which according to the book Warriors of Legend some children were so upset by the deaths of the four inner senshi that they made themselves sick and stayed home from school Moon rabbit this one I think should be a little bit higher but I guess people don't

16:54 know that the names of the characters in Japanese are all puns that have a direct indication on the planet that they represent usagi Sino would be in Japanese with the fam family name first skino usagi which literally translated as a sentence means the rabbit of the Moon that sounds a little bit weird unless you know the Japanese legend that instead of seeing any type of man on the moon the Japanese instead see the mountains and valleys of the Moon to create a rabbit pounding Mochi ikohara hated mamaRoo series director kunihiku ikuhara who ran Sailor Moon from the second half of Sailor Moon R until Sailor Moon supers then left to do revolutionary girl utna did indeed hate mamaru or at least what the concept of Mama represented for this storytelling possibilities

17:45 this comes directly from a quote where he says I'm still able to make a story where it's between a boy and a girl but I feel irritated when I see my girl getting together with some other guy I've tried to kill off Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon many times but no matter how many times I tried to kill him he gets resurrected and I only get angrier so I just decided it would be way better if the girl just doesn't have a boyfriend to begin with and if you think that's interesting boy you should hear me talk about the adolescence of utna how naoko wanted the dark kingdom Arc to end the dark kingdom Arc is the first Arc of Sailor Moon and it ends in the anime with episode 45 and 46 that we mentioned previously on this list that involves the Sailor soldiers all dying in an interview after that aired naoko said that she wanted to do something similar in the manga

18:37 but was stopped by her editor who said this is a manga for young girls you cannot kill everybody off well I don't doubt there's some degree of truth behind what naoko says here her comments largely strike me as sour grapes but then again I've talked quite a lot about how junichi Sato is more responsible for the success of Sailor Moon than naoko takiuchi so you can hang me on the cross and Electrify me with dark energy for that down in the comments the real sailor Earth something that many fans ask when they first get into the fandom why is there no sailor Earth well the in-universe explanation is that the starseed or Star Crystal or whatever we're calling it for the planet of Earth is held by Tuxedo Mask I suppose mamaru just chooses not to transform

19:25 into a leotard with a skirt because he should by All rights be capable Italian DS game Sailor Moon La Luna splende is a DS game officially licensed developed by Bandai Namco released in 2011 and only ever released in Italian there is no English nor no Japanese release for this game it's pretty common knowledge in the magical girls fear that the Italian fans very very much love and understand their magical girls so if any country other than the US and Japan got an exclusive sailor moon game I would guess Italy still it's very strange that it even exists probably a great topic for another documentary Hunter Hunter x Hunter how do you say that it's spy X family right

20:14 naoko is married to yoshihiro Togashi the creator of YuYu hak show and Hunter x Hunter as you would probably expect then there are plenty of crossover references hidden throughout all of these works is the name for the live action plays that are all about Sailor Moon these span from when the anime started airing in 93 all the way up to well there's still going on as of the time I make this video they often offer some kind of various continuity or different story than the main stories they're usually musicals as well and as somebody who went and experienced one first hand La Reconquista in 2013. I can say that I quite enjoyed it everyone on Earth has

21:03 a starseed again this gets in into the extended lore in the fifth season or Arc of Sailor Moon where the starseeds are a large factor in order to find the star Guardian crystals that she's looking for Galaxia has her minions check different human beings for the potential of a starseed and every single time of course they turn up Duds however that does mean that there is some starseed in each and every person again it's largely metaphorical for some type of Soul or Essence but there's some general implication that not everyone on other planets has a starseed and Earth would then be special in the Galaxy for this although mostly it's just a plot MacGuffin to make the monster of the day happen but if you want the actual version

21:51 of what Sailor Stars was doing with this idea look no further than the climax of hug toe Pretty Cure below the surface Snow White Talent this refers to the original Deke dub of Sailor Moon episode 56. in this episode the Sailor soldiers are putting on a play that being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with everyone in the group expecting a kiss from mamaRoo the prince the friends all argue about why they should be chosen as Snow White Makoto or Lita in this dub throws around her uh endowment to make her case for being Snow White since this original dub was bleached so hard for any controversial issues that of course was edited out and turned into the fact that Elita had the most Talent

22:42 however leaving the visuals unedited uh clearly still implied that her Talent resided in her chest but I'm the one with the most Talent here it's now a pretty well known in-joke in Sailor Moon communities that Talent is pretty visible on the outside parallel Sailor Moon this refers to one of the Side Stories created by Takeuchi for the manga this one from 1999 portrays a alternative Sailor Moon where usagi's second child kosagi meets up with the daughters of the other inner senshi that just so happened to look exactly like their mothers it's very very weird and more of an alternative continuity thing or perhaps even naoko satirizing her own work than it is anything Canon

23:29 tabletop RPG book this should really come as no surprise considering the scale of the franchise of Sailor Moon but there exists a tabletop RPG adaptation of Sailor Moon and the Sailor Moon Universe where you can play as a sailor Soldier or a guardian I read a bit of the book but I haven't had a chance to ever play myself but they say it's genuinely pretty good I will say that the magical girl background introduction essay is absolutely fantastic and I would recommend you read it shout outs to Mark McKinnon for writing it I wonder if that's a name that will come up later Sailor Moon another story speaking of media mix add-ons that are far too good for what they should be Sailor Moon another story is a turn-based RPG on the Super NES starring the cast of Sailor

24:20 Moon it's pretty imbalanced as an RPG goes but it is very fun to combine the characters attacks and the real calling card is the story featuring original characters that are in opposition to all of the inner senshi it was never officially released in English but there's a fantastic fan translation that you can find on the internet and it's absolutely worth at least watching a let's play just for the story cran Shin Chan Shin Chan is another pretty famous child's anime and manga in Japan that really doesn't have much visibility in the west it stars the rather rambunctious and sometimes even offensive character Shin Chan and his family many of the people who worked

25:05 on Sailor Moon including voice actors and staff have also worked on the Shin-chan anime and in relation to Sailor Moon you may notice that episode 104 was quite a weird episode with a lot of non-sequiturs and Screen Time given to one rather annoying character that character as you may guessed is a direct reference to shinosuke from crown shinchan and some of the voice actors from that show show up later in the episode Shin-chan as well has referenced Sailor Moon a number of times throughout its run princess Sailor Moon to explain princess Sailor Moon we kind of have to first explain pretty Guardian Sailor Moon pretty Guardian Sailor Moon was the live action TV at adaptation of Sailor Moon you may initially think that looks and sounds pretty

25:53 kitschy and bad but I assure you that's very much not the case for everyone who's really sat through it pretty Guardian Sailor Moon is actually some of the best that the franchise has to offer and it Sports plenty of endearing moments one of these moments is when sailor Moon's past self controls her present body in sort of a compassionless and austere personality she does not hesitate to use violence even Conjuring up her own Yoma pretty Guardian Sailor Moon continuity highly encouraged for any deep Sailor Moon fans chibiussa split timeline Theory this I believe refers to the classic time travel Paradox chibiosa being the daughter of usagi from the far future time travels

26:41 back from the 30th Century in order to save her world which is post-apocalyptic and under attack from the black moon client now for any of you that have any passing familiarity with anything from Terminator 2 to The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya to Back to the Future to hug toe Pretty Cure again if chibius is successful in her mission to undo the destruction of her future world than would she ever be put in the situation where she would go back to the past and then that would undo everything she did to undo the negative future that she came from and yeah you get where we're going with this manga sex scene this one's pretty straightforward and pretty hard to miss usagi and mamaru canonically have sex at the beginning of the second Arc in Sailor Moon the original anime

27:29 did not feature this scene but it was apparently pretty important to Takeuchi so she included it when she had creative control in Sailor Moon Crystal episode 67 now the original run of Sailor Moon ran for 200 episodes many of those are not canonically related to anything or some of them don't even have a monster of the day situation when you have such a long-running show you do have to get a little weird with it sometimes episode 67 is one of those times it's the beach episode for Sailor Moon R where chibiussa and the inner soldiers just relax and hang out on the beach for most of the episode and then shibiosa encounters what appears to be a plesiosaur hijinks ensue a

28:14 volcano erupts Mako drives a speedboat and they I guess save the dinosaur yes this episode is memes but I don't care what anybody says it's actually entertaining one other interesting little tidbit about this episode was that it was for whatever reason not included on the original North American DVD release of Sailor Moon R it's simply too high quality sailor Luna continuing on with the theme of things that are absolutely wild we're back again with pretty Guardian sailor Moon's live action TV show and how Luna is handled in that show throughout most of the show she is just a plush they don't even bother with a real cat or any type of CGI or anything like that however she does have an alternative form when she transforms into a young child this child as you may have

29:05 guessed has a sailor senchy transformation once again if you have any tolerance for Camp pretty Guardian Sailor Moon comes highly recommended multiple sailor plutos this refers to the two roles that are kind of given to Sailor Pluto throughout the series one is to guard the space-time door that controls the flow of time or something nebulous like that there's kind of this whole character Arc of her wanting to live her own life and have relationship with King and Demian but she's Bound by duty to guard this door and then Midway through Sailor Moon s she just kind of shows up and starts this polyamorous life with Uranus and Neptune just out of nowhere there and we're like I guess the whole door thing got resolved this has led to some fans speculating

29:54 maybe there's some time nonsense going on and there's multiple sailor Pluto's one of which is still guarding that door Universal Studios this is the first one I'm not a hundred percent sure what the author intended to reference here there have been multiple instances of Sailor Moon merchandise and attractions showing up at Universal Studios over the years I don't recall one in particular being super special or stand out translating mabaroshi no ginsuisho this fact is in reference to what is commonly known as the Silver Crystal or legendary silver Crystal because mabaroshi has a number of different meanings in Japanese it was translated very poorly throughout most of the original dub of Sailor Moon simply due to a lack of consistency in the script writing the names

30:42 given are Silver Moon Crystal the silver Crystal the Imperium silver Crystal the Moon Crystal and the Imperium Crystal these faux pas didn't even stop there leading it to be referred to as the legendary silver Crystal the Mystic silver Crystal and the illusionary silver Crystal or Phantom silver crystal in some other translations darkiri we're heading back into the very famous and very fruitful realm of pretty Guardian Sailor Moon here dark Yuri is a brainwashed version of Sailor Mercury she fights the other soldiers but is eventually redeemed because she cares about usagi the brainwashing of mercury actually goes on for a pretty substantial amount of time which is all the more okay with me because look at her oh my God are you kidding the glow

31:31 up Mercury always needed Jupiter is not an outer senshi this refers to the concept that the inner soldiers as they are called in Sailor Moon are a group of the four closest planets to Earth and if you know your astrology you'll know that the division between the inner inner solar system and the outer solar system is generally considered to be the asteroid belt past Mars but before Jupiter making Jupiter part of the outer solar system if we follow this very strict interpretation Sailor Jupiter would make more sense to appear later in Sailor Moon with Uranus and Neptune but that's not the case and not what happens much like the mix-up between Sailor Saturn and Sailor Pluto we'll just chalk this one up to the story not matching the astrology sailor cosmos's identity

32:18 we only ever see sailor Cosmos in the final Arc of the manga since Sailor Stars differs in its ending pretty severely from what happens in the manga the manga's ending involves Intergalactic war from chaos and sailor Cosmos goes back to the past to try and prevent that future from coming to be but it turns out she's just a child and has to get help from Sailor Moon stop me if you've heard that one before sailor Cosmos is backstory story and who she is in relation to the greater Galaxy is meant to be ambiguous but she looks exactly like Sailor Moon in case it's not clear I much prefer Sailor Stars as ending again feel free to come at me for that real life azubu jiban the setting of Sailor Moon the juban District of Tokyo is indeed the juban District of Tokyo

33:09 the next time you're in the Manata Ward you can just stop by the hikawa shrine prototype senshi the Prototype shenshi refers to some Doodles that naoko did before she finalized the designs of the Sailor soldiers they include a couple different and more gadgety looks to all their outfits and uh yeah they're probably a bit over designed too I can see why they were changed however one fun thing to note is that Mercury's visor is visible here something she would later canonically have in the show ditto for Jupiter's little lightning rod usagi is probably bisexual this is a fairly common and even preferred reading among most Sailor Moon fans and there's plenty of textual evidence to support it in addition to men throughout the show usagi is shown to visibly be attracted to

33:56 Rey harika michidu and a few other women on top of this we add in her effusive empathy for other people her very strong bonds with her female friends that constitute much of the emotional backbone of the series The pro-sexuality and pro polyamory relationship hints that we've gotten over the show and we arrive at a place where it's very easy to believe usagi would be entirely open to a relationship with another woman magical girls almost always have some type of lesbian tinge to them and Sailor Moon is certainly no exception terminally ill minico once again we return to the pretty Guardian Sailor Moon continuity where minico has some unspecified chronic terminal illness this adds a whole lot of drama to her portrayal but it doesn't really show up in any

34:45 other incarnation of Sailor Moon Sailor Neptune in season one Sailor Neptune along with Sailor Uranus is introduced in season three of Sailor Moon and does not appear before that however this Theory refers to one screen from the a flashback scene of the silver Millennium in season one episode 44. this screenshot shows many of the residents of the silver Millennium in bubbles being sent away to their future lives to be reincarnated in one of those bubbles is a figure unspecified but who has hair and a figure that looks suspiciously like one michiru Kyo this however is not entirely a coincidence someone once asked the animation director for this episode Hisashi Kagawa and

35:33 Kagawa responded on Twitter he States quote I had figured there would probably be other sailor soldiers other than the ones we saw in the series so I decided to handle that by drawing the small silhouette of a character however just by Chance the colors I just us through together happened to end up being close to sailor Neptunes at least that's what I think happened it's a pretty funny random coincidence considering Neptune wouldn't appear for two more seasons shallow Waters anti-std campaign speaking of usagi's sex positivity in November 2016 Japan's Ministry of Health was launching an anti-std campaign fighting against chlamydia syphilis and AIDS sexually transmitted diseases were on the rise up over a hundred percent from where they were in the

36:23 1990s to help with this campaign the Ministry of Health decided to do a deal with you guessed it Sailor Moon leading to this amazing flyer that says if you don't get checked out I'll punish you Polly outer senshi it seems when the status quo comes up for the outer senchy they choose to live together in a polyamorous relationship we can see this in the manga as well as the anime in s and again in Stars it also fits pretty generally in with haruka's flirting with other girls and of course little baby hotaru when she is in the care of the other outer senshi has no trouble what's so ever identifying both her mamas and her papa I don't believe there's any indication that the relationship extends sexually Beyond michidu and Haruka so maybe it's more of a roommate situation

37:11 and they were roomy God they were roommates PQ Angels manuscript lost PQ Angels is the first manga that Takeuchi did after she finished with Sailor Moon it ran for only four chapters with no conclusion in 1997 because kodansha the Publishing Company lost takeuchi's manuscripts she was justifiably Furious haruka's gender identity Haruka tenno and Sailor Uranus by extension have a gender that is introduced in this panel in the manga the wording on the translation often left for a bit of ambiguity that was probably not intended even if there was quite a bit of intended ambiguity in haruka's gender various translations throughout the years have indicated that either

37:59 Haruka is some degree of gender fluid or intersex or it can be read that Haruka generally has the traits of both a male and a female Haruka even directly declines to label herself as either gender and she's seen both presenting a traditional masculine and traditionally Fem feminine outfits and styles throughout most of the franchise harka's gender is mind your own [ __ ] business kin moku Serenity Moon mythology connections alright this is a pretty deep one for this part on the iceberg so try and stay with me on this Keen moku is the name of the planet where princess Kaku and the Sailor Starlights hail from Takeuchi likely chose this name because it would form a pun if you turned it into the name of a planet it would be Keen moku SEI which is a

38:47 golden osmanthus or well something from the olive family that's traditionally used in Southeast Asia you can use it for tea or as an insect repellent however the interesting connection here is that one yes princess kaku's costume does indeed have versions of this plant on it but also the moon rabbit myth that we tied in earlier as connected to usagi and her name has an accompanying myth where there is an osmanthus Tree on the moon I take it to mean that Takeuchi was implying that princess kakyu can be viewed in the same way that Princess Serenity was for our solar system Luna the moon fairy Luna apparently was not always designed to be a cat an early sketch shows both Luna and her daughter Diana as some representation of a fairy these early sketches can be seen in the

39:36 Sailor Moon materials collection paper dress-up dolls now before everything in our lives was made out of plastic there existed things called paper dolls they basically fill the same void as a regular doll would for a young girl but are substantially cheaper and easier to make as they're made out of paper it should come as no surprise then that Sailor Moon appealing to young girls would have representations in the paper doll Market nalco's suggestive Sailor Moon drawings as previously stated in a couple of these entries we see that naoko really envisioned Sailor Moon as having some degree of sexuality baked into it or she didn't really feel the need to whitewash away that one aspect of a teenager's life as such in her extended drawings from the art books you

40:23 can find some pretty risque drawings and even the less than explicitly sexual drawings still have this air of uh approachability to them Erwin dolls the rabbit hole of Sailor Moon merchandise as one of the largest intellectual properties ever does contain a number of depths that we can probe one of those is the Irwin dolls Irwin toys is a Canadian toy manufacturer and distributor that had the rights for the North American distribution of Sailor Moon when the show first came over what they didn't really have for the first North American debut run of Sailor Moon was any type of accuracy towards the source material causing the first run of Sailor Moon dolls produced by them to show a number of mistakes including the wrong type of boots or the wrong transformation

41:12 item I think you can imagine how this would then become something of a collector's paradise and moon sisters.org has a large and in-depth rundown of the entire Irwin doll toy line if you're interested or perhaps even sitting on some very valuable merchandise kaito Aces curse on Sailor V Sailor V was the manga prequel to Sailor Moon containing the adventures of get this Sailor Venus while the anime changes her backstory a bit it's still canonical that Sailor V was a crime fighter long established before Sailor Moon in the Sailor V manga there's a character called kaito or Phantom Ace who minico has some type of longing pining relationship for its very Tuxedo Mask in early Sailor Moon unfortunately for minico Ace is a bad guy and that means they

42:02 cannot be together in his dying act he chooses to curse minako so that all of her romantic Pursuits will always end fruitlessly there's no reason for this to canonically stick into the events of Sailor Moon but funnily enough it does through every representation of miniko clover wave fisheye while the first two seasons of Sailor Moon were the responsibility of Canadian company Deke the third and fourth Seasons s and supers were handled by cloverway which was the North American branch of toei Animation at the time their localizers were met with a bit of a trouble when depicting the character of fisheye fisheye is canonically male but presents pretty effeminately in a way that would largely not have been looked upon very fondly 20 years ago especially for Children's

42:51 Entertainment so much like the other objectionable content throughout this series fisheye was edited their gender was changed and they present entirely as a female in the English dub while understandable for the time I mean the same thing happened to zoysite in season one fisheye's gender swap in English led to a pretty funny oversight in one episode where they are portrayed topless ironically making the English up far more lewd than it was in Japanese princess naoko planning Japanese intellectual property rights are a bit different than those in the west and they tend to favor the original creator of an intellectual property pretty heavily as such naoko created a LLC or something along those lines called Princess now co-planning which she used to maintain the

43:40 intellectual property of Sailor Moon throughout all its various releases and media lyrics if you've ever watched Sailor Moon supers you will be well aware of its famous ending song which is by all accounts a complete Bop even back in the day and still today [Music] when studied however the lyrics make decidedly less sense they're clearly from chibius's point of view and they're clearly positive but they mentioned something called a profile a number of times well you might think something like a social media profile would be relevant no this was the 90s so the profile in question is likely a profile notebook in which young girls primarily would have their friends

44:27 all listed out and including their likes dislikes blood type birthday etc etc the first page in this notebook is all about the owner of the notebook and the song is literally telling chibiussa that she can rewrite that page to whatever she wants it to be this coincides with the message and themes of the song about self-discovery and Adolescence you can read more about this on the tuxedo unmasked blog links to all of these resources will be below the rejected Sailor Moon movie became revolutionary girl uttana this is a pretty famous story that comes directly from the mouth of kunihiku ikuhara himself after he had left production on Sailor Moon while ikuni had been series director for the latter half of R all the way through S and supers he only did

45:17 one movie for the franchise that is Sailor Moon R promise of the Rose he was however put in charge of production on the Sailor Moon supers movie and the plot that he had come up with was going to entail Uranus and Neptune as the main characters with Sailor Neptune in a thousand years sleep at the end of the world Sailor Uranus would then steal usagi's Talisman for the purposes of awaking Sailor Neptune and ride off on a black Pegasus and there was to be a big chase sequence where Sailor Moon would ride after Uranus on a white Pegasus this is the primary reason why the opening of revolutionary girl udna features this exact same imagery even though it has no bearing on the show whatsoever unfortunately the production of this version of the supers movie fell through ikuni

46:06 states that a member of the production team left toei at the time and this person was somebody who had written the script along with ikahara and he didn't feel comfortable making the film without them on the staff it's very likely the person in question is writer Yoji and okido as ikuni confirms that they work together to create revolutionary girl utna then thereafter try not to feel bad for enokito though he teamed up with long time friend and Sailor Moon veteran director igarashi to do a number of anime from Soul Eater to oron High School Host Club and now they've got a great thing going on at bones where they just do endless seasons of Bongo stray dogs the sinking deeper senshi with guns putting aside this early naoko artwork of usagi wielding a gun

46:56 there is one obvious canonical example of a sailor Soldier using a gun and then one of dubious Cannon which is a very funny pun of course chibiu says Luna pee ball can transform into a number of different objects and primarily used throughout the black moon and Sailor Moon are arcs one of these items famously used in her first appearance and then again in the Sailor Moon R movie is a gun the reference that would be a bit more obscure and warrant this level of depth on the iceberg would be a Sailor Moon quiz video game slash episode made for a toy phone and VCR platform in 1994.

47:41 this official game slash Lost episode contains a number of pretty great images one of which suggests that Rey fights with with fire powers in addition to Firepower Evangelion Sailor Moon connections it's entirely no secret whatsoever that Neon Genesis Evangelion Creator hideyekiano is a huge Sailor Moon fan this resulted in a number of crossovers between Sailor Moon and sailor Moon's directors and staff and the cast of Evangelion I have my own video talking about the time junichi Sato director of Sailor Moon worked on Evangelion and I would highly encourage you to go watch that for all the details but here I'll just do a quick rapid fire list of

48:27 crossovers between the two Works Anno boarded the transformation sequences for Uranus and Neptune in Sailor Moon s ano and ikuni are good friends and speak highly of each other's Works they have also appeared together at conventions in panels occasionally in the past the character of kauru is said to be inspired by a trip to the hot springs that Anno had with ikohara Anno indeed begged ikahara to help him work on Evangelion even going so far as to Name the character of Rey ayanami after ikuni's favorite sailor Soldier while ikuni would decline to two obligations with revolutionary girl uttana Anno also had a deep respect for series director junichi Sato and successfully convinced him to board a few episodes as well as part of the second rebuild

49:15 movie many fans probably know this one but kotuno mitsuishi the voice actor for usagi only got the role as Colonel katsuragi because of her work on Sailor Moon leading to a very funny 2021 where she reprized her role as usagi and katsuragi and the legendary Taya Yamada all in the same year while I would also present symbolic and thematic evidence that more bleeds over from Sailor Moon into Evangelion there can be no denying a direct reference in anno's Prior work gunbuster where several educational shorts feature this sailor Soldier designs called out directly the three o'clock fairy this refers to the song sung in the supers movie when the antagonist of the

50:01 film lures young children out of their homes at 3am the specific time of 3 am however also refers to the 3 P.M in the afternoon snack time which is often the case for children in Japan this is why the lyrics of the song mostly talk about sweets and snacks Sailor Moon musical ice skating show while I'm not entirely sure how much of a musical it is different from the Sailor Mew musicals where the cast all sing I believe this refers to the show prism on ice this would have been a very high production Quality Ice Skating Show featuring world-class International ice skating Talent you may have been familiar with a Russian ice skater who cosplayed as Sailor Moon in a performance a while ago that skater was Olympic silver medalist yevgenya mevejiva and

50:49 yes she was set to Star as Sailor Moon and is a big anime fan that's just a sample of what prism on Ice would have included had it not been said to Premiere in June of 2020. of course due to the covid pandemic the production of the show was put on hold and is now set to Premiere in 2023 but don't hold your breath old sailor moon commercials understandably this could pretty much land anywhere on this Iceberg there's some pretty well-known stuff and some pretty obscure stuff I particularly like this one where they try to sell you Sailor Moon s Curry look it's got this original footage where all the Sailor soldiers run over Tuxedo Mask why I have no idea they want some Curry the curry is that good and you get a free clock dystopia Crystal Tokyo for

51:35 those that don't know in the second season of Sailor Moon they go to the Future and find that neo-queen Serenity the adult form of Sailor Moon has become Queen regnan of the Earth in a place called Crystal Tokyo after apparently warding off the second Ice Age and saving the Earth although there is absolutely no elaboration on that this entry on the iceberg however refers to the fact that Crystal Tokyo is apparently this homogeneous under the monarchy of King and Demian and neoqueen serenity although it's never explored Crystal Tokyo and has never seen to be a functioning Society one could posit that the inhabitants of Crystal Tokyo may not all be okay with living under one God Queen emperor in fact the only other time this is kind of mentioned or brought up in

52:21 sort of a questionable light or negative light is in the plot of Sailor Moon another story which we mentioned earlier on the iceberg the idea that somehow Crystal Tokyo would be less than perfect is part of why that plot of that game is so interesting the secret Hammer Prince Hall in January of 1995 an earthquake struck Kobe and Osaka Japan as part of the relief efforts for this earthquake naoko guested on a TV variety show called tunnels Hammer Prince there she auctioned off a One-Shot side of manga with all the proceeds going to charity for the survivors the winning bid was around 2 million yen or about twenty thousand dollars this led to the creation of the fourth Sailor Moon Side Story manga which would take way way too long to describe here but I do encourage

53:11 you to read it because it is batshit insane silver Crystal slash Pink Moon Crystal retcon this refers to the end of the dream Arc in the [ __ ] where chibius's Crystal that allows her to transform finally becomes something uniquely hers the pink moon crystal in the first edition of the manga it looks identical to usagi's Crystal however in the second and onwards it has changed to have a more more Lotus inspired design it's probably a good bet that naoko simply wanted to differentiate symbolically each abuse of from her mother a little bit more at Sailor Moon CA I would tell you about this but I'm hella blocked I have never interacted with this person apparently they are somewhat famous for being overly acerbic and uh let's say not representing the best values of

53:59 both magical girl genre and of the Canadian people over on Twitter while they stylize themselves as representing the Sailor Moon fandom in Canada they often can be found starting arguments about why the original Deke dub which again was a Canadian product is not available in Canada tuxedo masks transformation I'm not quite sure what's intended here but there's two small facts I guess the first is that he never transforms in the manga and has more of a Cardcaptor Sakura just dress up in a tuxedo and mask whenever he appears as far as his transformation sequence you see it a few times in the anime in episodes 9 19 very quickly and then again in 34 when he Reveals His identity to usagi but honestly I like the one from the s movie with the blimp and Santa Claus a whole lot more

54:49 Merry Christmas Happy New Year [Music] punch out we in 2009 Canadian Studio Next Level games created a sequel to the punch out franchise for the Wii of course having fully modeled 3D boxing but in the same point of view and gameplay as the original punch out because of the fixed camera for the punch out series it would be very easy for somebody at Next Level games to hide a little Easter egg in some area that the viewer would never be able to see and that they did occasionally between rounds piston Honda will pull out a manga and start reading if you somehow boundary break shout outs to she says who covered this fact a little while ago you can take the camera behind piston Honda and see that

55:37 he's reading yup you guessed it an actual page from Sailor Moon judging by the pages they used both the programmer and piston Honda are now Saya usagi shippers you are never allowed to even get a glimpse of this in normal gameplay and it's only with boundary breaking tools that you would be able to see this however the the rumors are that when Nintendo learned about this only after she says his video in 2017 they freaked out and their relationship with Next Level games was strained to the point where it cost around 2 million dollars to the Canadian company I mean I guess it's all water under the bridge now Nintendo did buy Next Level games in 2021 but man those must have been some awkward meetings to have to try and explain to the Nintendo higher-ups why you use the Sailor

56:26 Moon manga as a simple Easter egg that would never be seen by anyone and it wasn't for eight years anyway go watch who says this video and his follow-up video detailing the rumors cyborg Sailor Mercury this comes from an offhanded quote of a nowco interview where she states that one of her ideas for Sailor Mercury in the first season would be that she would be a cyborg her editor apparently told her no but it seems that she may have gotten the last laugh considering that a couple years later she made hotaru kananaki a cyborg Rey is ikahara's personal waifu this one is no secret and ikuni has admitted in many interviews that his favorite sailor Soldier was Rey this is also why you see a lot more character building for Rey across the series episodes like

57:13 Luna's worst day ever or Rey's romance with Tuxedo Mask and things along those lines were all the creation of ikuni this is of course editorializing but I do feel that Rey's portrayal in the 90s anime was one of its greatest successes anyway here's the famous picture of ikuni cosplaying as Sailor Mars endless absurd bootleg merch not sure what you're expecting me to say here but Sailor Moon is one of the highest grossing intellectual properties of all time so it comes as no surprise many people wouldn't feel too friendly about paying naoko to use it I'm assuming that I found some crazy merchandise and editing and I'm flashing it on the screen whoa look at that that's crazy viz booklet controversy in 2014 teen viz media announced that they had obtained the

57:59 rights to re-release and re-dub a sailor moon into English by 2019 they had made it all the way up to the first English release of Sailor Stars the limited edition Blu-ray release included a booklet a booklet which featured a relationship chart a relationship chart that listed Haruka and michidu as friends which I guess to some degree if you are each other's soul mates and lovers then yeah your friends but that kind of seems like underselling it a bit doesn't it or at worst lesbian Erasure for a couple that had been fighting that exact issue for the last 25 years to the point where perhaps the most notable aspect of the pair was their couple status once the justifiable outrage hit viz reprinted the book labeling them instead as partners the bottom Prince Uranus Prince Uranus

58:52 was a somewhat popular fanfic Trope back in the day when the original show was airing the idea was that Haruka was grappling with some sort of disassociation with her gender identity having been male in her past life this headcanon was largely used to deal with haruka's male presenting appearance I think most in the fandom would find it a little bit distasteful nowadays if not outright homophobia and bigotry however if we give the people that bought into this the benefit of the doubt then it's an example of how quickly our social attitudes have changed over the last 20 years hitoshi DOI hitoshi Dua is a Japanese baseball player as well as webmaster so he discovered that he had a passion for identifying voice actors in anime beginning with Sailor Moon he acted on this passion and created an extensive website cataloging all the voice actors for shows

59:44 like magic users Club Sailor Moon himachan's ribbon featuring English language translations of many of the materials only available in Japan because there were so few English language resources back in the day this site became a very integral resource to the Western speaking Sailor Moon fandom and DOI remains one of the leading experts related to All Things Sailor Moon as well as voice actors over the past 30 years Miyuki kanbe kanbe was a theater actress who starred as usagi in the third run of the Sailor Moon musicals naturally she was a talented singer and she just so happened to lend her voice to the opening theme songs of Mermaid Melody peachy peachy pitch sadly she had a chronic heart condition and passed away in 2008 Sailor Moon versus Sailor Moon now

1:00:36 if you're just listening to this as a podcast that probably doesn't sound very good or maybe it sounds a lot more awesome than it actually is the entry on the iceberg is referring to a romanization issue when changing the cut takana over to the Roman alphabet at the beginning of the franchise's life there were no style guides to tell the Japanese speakers that sailor and moon were two separate words this caused quite a bit of debate back in the early days of the fandom including some fans insisting that there's no space to be had in Sailor Moon as there are no spaces between words and Japanese if you think that's pedantic that's because it is cook Island coins in 2018 the small British protectorate of the Cook Islands offered commemorative ten dollar

1:01:22 coins on one side you've got Sailor Moon the silver Millennium the Sailor soldiers on the other side the late Queen Elizabeth Neptune awakened herself in the original anime run of Sailor Moon s we see the episode where Haruka is awakened to Sailor Uranus in this episode mitsuru appears and helps her during this process she herself already being Sailor Neptune and of course we see the rest of the soldiers as well while Artemis helps minico and usagi is helped by Luna so who helped Sailor Neptune awaken that question is never answered Sailor Moon card game in the long forgotten dark abyss before bushy Road came in with Y Schwartz to monetize every anime into a collectible card game

1:02:08 that task instead fell to a Canadian company called Dart flip cards they published both a tradable and playable Collective card game based on Sailor Moon in the late 90s into early 2000s the creator of this card game was a man by the name of mark C McKinnon assuming you watched this video in order you already knew who they are it really is a small fandom at the end of the day year redo after season one there's a couple ways of looking at the end of season one and do soggy's wish in episode 46. this Century in the iceberg is directly referring to the in-universe plot of season one in in which all the memories of the Sailor soldiers are wiped as they are reborn ostensibly there is some time dilation going on too as everything is reset to the beginning of

1:03:00 the first season with usagi repeating the same year in school as she did previously there is evidence for a hard timeline enforced in the anime and the manga just based on the girls ages but it's nothing more than passingly interesting shout outs to homura kemi Moon animate makeup this is a fantastic fan made collaborative animation project from 2014 where the entire episode is reanimated shot by shot by over 250 individual animators there is no cohesive art style and it's one of the most inspiring and incredible crowdsourced fan projects that you could possibly imagine I

1:03:45 would highly recommend to the point of insisting that you go watch it anime GAO kigurubi this term refers to a broad type of Cosplay in which the character's face is replaced by an anime-esque mask instead of just the cosplayer's normal face it's decidedly less popular because it of course requires a big mask to be worn but also because the expression cannot change it ends up giving this Eerie uncanny valley or a just plain creepy Vibe this term used here does not just apply to Sailor Moon although of course being a large anime property there are many anime GAO kigurumi for Sailor Moon Sailor Moon was awakened by accident Theory you'll hopefully recall the first episode of Sailor Moon or the first chapter of the [ __ ] where sail moon is awakened by Luna

1:04:34 after usagi saves the Black Cat from some bullies this theory is in general reference to the fact that Sailor Moon does not exist in the silver Millennium whereas all the other princesses and sailor soldiers do who happen to exist in the past furthermore there's a lot of coding in the manga specifically but also a bit in the original anime that Sailor Venus is the leader of the Sailor soldiers and has somehow more importance and relevance to the plot coupling the lack of a sailor moon in the past with the importance of Sailor Venus in the manga as well as the fact that Luna never remembers Princess Serenity in any version of the show gives Credence to this idea that perhaps minico was the one Luna was searching for and Luna simply didn't remember that however

1:05:21 there's just plenty of textual evidence that this really is an inaccurate Theory and more

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