PGSM is still the grand champion of everything I look for in a show. It’s what I wish RWBY was. I would legitimately trade all that beautiful and badass fighting for the three-dimensional characters and relationships PGSM put so much of its effort into. The first anime, manga, and other iterations (that I’ve seen, so I have no comment on the musicals) pale in comparison to PGSM’s writing. I don’t even care about deep or meaningful plot or an interwoven world/lore, I just want characters who care about one another and the conflicts they run into with one another. It would be ultimately built on the theme of friendship, and anything outside of it that is secondary.
Despite all the usual themes in a Sailor Moon series like past tragic lives and romance, that was the number one priority in PGSM, and I could tell. I am glad it was. I feel the friendship among the sailors in PGSM is strongest among all its iterations. Even aside from that PGSM was still strong in its themes and plot too, taking later parts of the Sailor Moon canon and brilliantly twisting such conflicts all into the Dark Kingdom Arc. Saturn as the literal embodiment of doom was written into Princess Sailor Moon. Chibiusa’s insecurities that caused her to be corrupted into Black Lady was revamped with Mercury as Dark Mercury. The distance of the Outers to the Inners in their utmost devotion to complete a mission was inherited by Venus.
Even the villain henchmen who I had no attachment to despite the love between Zoicite and Kunzite in the first Anime were given interesting motives and backstory for their actions. Instead of being minions all killed off fairly quickly in the manga or being stock-level evil, they each had their own sense of loyalty. Jadeite stayed loyal to Beryl to the end even after all the revelations of the Shitennou’s true purpose. Nephrite struggled with inadequacy and had to adapt to the real world when Beryl essentially fired him and stripped him of his powers. Zoicite was the first to remember his past life and was the most loyal to Endymion, the most active in trying to prevent the tragedy of the Silver Millennium from harming his master again. Kunzite sought revenge after the selfish desires of Endymion and Serenity ended their past lives and acted independently of both sides most of the time.
If I ever see a reboot of a show I love, it should never be a carbon-copy of its original with updated animation and graphics. Crystal is a re-telling of the manga mostly faithfully so it is luckily not doing such. There should always be a creative re-telling of what we saw before, giving us a reason to not only want to see our nostalgic favourite characters again, but a reason we should continue seeing them. Sometimes a carbon-copy or even a sequel can be messy. Even what PGSM tries to do can be messy if it is not written well, or if the changes are unpopular with the target audience. However, if you have the courage to do just that and succeed, the end product will be far superior to any other type of reboot.
Sadly PGSM’s status as a live action itself, and its obvious low budget concerning its effects will live on in infamy. Despite the brilliance it offers some people cannot jump over the hurdle of a cat being a plushie, or all the fight scenes being glorified ballet, but if people can simply overlook such things, they would not regret it.
(I still can’t get my brother to watch it, who still continued watching Crystal after I dropped it. :( )
Also that isn’t to say Sailor Moon in its animated or comic form are bad, far from it. Sailor Moon is a wonderful franchise and is awesome in all of its mediums, but I cannot reiterate how amazing PGSM is, and how I wish everyone who I knew saw Sailor Moon would give it a chance. Yes, I can say that now because Crystal is pretty good too in spite of its many flaws.
I finished Sailor Moon Crystal out of sheer frustration (was going through some SM nostalgia and just said fuck it) and holy crap the artstyle in S is so much better and the transformations are no longer CGI AND ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL. I NEVER SKIPPED THEM EVEN ONCE LIKE I DID BEFORE S (or season 3 or whatever we’re calling it)
AND this season was 100% faithful to the manga! The goofy comedic super deformed style that happens in the manga/original anime came back in this season too, so it was also much more charming than previous. I highly recommend to watch at least season 3 of Crystal if you love Sailor Moon because I dropped Crystal way back in the day after watching the travesty of the original arc.
I took a peek a Dragonball Super too and Crystal s3 is animated way better than that. (Probably because DBSuper now has like 90000 episodes despite both being by Toei) Like at no point was animation ever a problem in season three.
