When I first saw Sailor Moon in the 90’s it was one of the first anime series’s I watched, I didn’t even know what anime was, it was up to that point called Japanamation and video stores had some cable channels had anime playing.
western action cartoons at that time and in previous decades had the same formula to make money by creating a show for the kids and sell toys. But western animation didn’t care about plot or interesting characters especially when it came to villains, the villains were there to be the antagonist with little to no motivation except to take over the world.
Some anime did come into the west in the 60’s-80’s but heavily edited for violence and storyline changes to fit a different narrative One clear example is Beast King Golion or better known as in the west ‘Voltron’ , the original BKG was another lineup of mecha sentai anime’s but it had the clear end at 52 episodes, the villains die and the heroes finished the journey.
When it was dubbed into English, they censored all death scenes including the villain, so the villains gets away at the end of Voltron so they can continue the story with a mangled version of Dairugger (a complete different anime)
Sailor Moon’s English dub (DiC) also gave less backstory to the dark kingdom villains as they were from another dimension called the ‘negaverse’ and that’s all there was to them. But they couldn’t censor when Sailor moon blasted Beryl into dust, this was the first time I had seen an animated show kill off the villain. They tried to play it off saying Beryl was blasted into the negaverse but my 7 year old mind knew that she was dead.
Years later I find the old Sailor Moon websites detailing the Japanese anime and its manga. I was taken aback at the backstory of all the villains in the anime version as well as the manga. They were much different than a western cartoon where the show had no conclusion or any type of backstory on a villain.
Also the villains in Sailor moon were so pretty , including the handsome males, all western cartoon villains were either really old or ugly and monstrous. In a lot of stories the villains are motivated by jealousy of youth and beauty , the hero is young and beautiful/handsome. But in Sailor Moon everyone is beautiful, the motives are different here, Beryl was in love, Demande wanted to conquer the Earth because he was banished to a slum planet of criminals, anime Tomoe wanted his daughter to live and made a deal to plant an alien seed in her, his manga counterpart was a mad scientist who wants to play GOD and kept his cyborg daughter alive and wanted to make perfect human/alien hybrids using the alien eggs including on himself, Nehelenia depending on which version wanted to be beautiful forever or she was after the reincarnation of princess she cursed a millennia ago, Galaxia saw the universe as unforgiving and decided to kill everyone and bring them to their birthplace , or she was sacrificing her seed out to find help while absorbing the absolute evil in the universe.
***Sorry for the long response I started rambling too much ***
