Toon Makers (Saban Moon) Sailor Moon pilot?

  • This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn more.
Apr 1, 2017
588
432
165
36
D-Point
#41
Haha, this Sailor Moon R Christmas stageshow thing is kind of amazing in a terrible way! (How does one get drunk on nonacoholic champaign, anyway?) The heads wouldn't be creepy to me, except that they made the mouths a big open space with teeth. Should've made them a flat pink space or something, like on figurines. The person playing Usagi in the costume actually did a great job on the motions and body language I think.

I wonder if Emi Shinohara and Fukami Rica were disappointed or relieved that they didn't have their own mascots to voice-dub...

I definitely agree about the cost thing. And DiC could've scraped off even more costs by keeping the original music (and by trivially switching out Moonlight Densetsu, Maboroshi No Ginzuishou, and soforth for the instrumental versions; though I am glad we god "My Only Love" out of the way things turned out, and it was probably a good marketing call to make some sort of English song to the tune of Moonlight Densetsu).

They probably overdid the editing time, too, even if the censorship was all required; what I mean is they tried to lip-sync all the english dialogue, and made tons of tiny little pacing changes for some reason, like they poured over every single clip and fiddled with all of them. I wouldn't be surprised if they had complete-but-unaired prototypes of the cut episodes, too. But even then, it was probably a lot cheaper than making an all-new show.

Yeah, to make a new show with Sailor Moon stock footage, you'd need to be imitating Sailor Moon's animation style... which would probably wind up looking like that janky old fanclub badge thing. That'd be a whole different weird project than what Toon Makers was doing. (That, or they could go halfway, using DiC-style scenes from the anime, but intersplicing them with new live action scenes a la the "Tommy Kennedy" bookended Transformers episodes).
 
Sep 6, 2014
3,386
3,687
1,665
#42
With the score thing DiC was clearly following the Saban business model of “we can make more money if we make our own brand new score”

I heard some animes bgm is a separate license but I’m doubtful that was the case for Sailor Moon. I know with Digimon Adventure at least it’s constant use of Bolero as a motif would have been an issue since that song wasn’t in the public domain in 1999/2000 in the U.S like it was in Japan
 
Apr 1, 2017
588
432
165
36
D-Point
#45
I can see the resemblance, on the face/mouth thing.

Whenever I think of these crazy vehicles (like the Moon Cycle), I like to try to imagine them somehow appearing in the actual '90s anime with the actual official versions of the characters using them and still having the same personalities, and just acting like these craft are completely normal.

So imagining Beryl and the Shitennou riding on that thing as they go to invade Silver Millennium, leading the charge on that big cyan fog of army dudes, is kind of amazing.

(Similarly, I like to imagine Tobey Maguire from the Sam Raimi Spiderman films piloting the Spider Machine GP-7 and Leopardon.)
 

Neon Genesis

Solaris Luna
Oct 31, 2015
2,332
297
165
#47
LifeGaveMeLemons said:
With the score thing DiC was clearly following the Saban business model of “we can make more money if we make our own brand new score”

I heard some animes bgm is a separate license but I’m doubtful that was the case for Sailor Moon. I know with Digimon Adventure at least it’s constant use of Bolero as a motif would have been an issue since that song wasn’t in the public domain in 1999/2000 in the U.S like it was in Japan
I don't think it's the case of making more money but American soundtracks are fundamentally different from Japanese soundtracks. Japanese soundtracks place more emphasis on long breaks of silence while American soundtracks place more emphasis on constant noise which is why you often had lots of added music and dialog in scenes that were originally silent in Americanized dubs in the 90s'. A big example of this would be the Disney dubs of Castle in the Sky and Kiki's Delivery Service. Also keeping the original soundtrack would have been difficult to have it sync up with the video footage with all the extreme amounts of cuts DiC made. It was easier to just keep the Japanese soundtrack in the Cloverway dub because Cloverway made less visual cuts.
 
Apr 20, 2012
2,258
179
165
31
Texas
skelenator-rainbow.tumblr.com
#48
Neon Genesis said:
I don't think it's the case of making more money but American soundtracks are fundamentally different from Japanese soundtracks. Japanese soundtracks place more emphasis on long breaks of silence while American soundtracks place more emphasis on constant noise which is why you often had lots of added music and dialog in scenes that were originally silent in Americanized dubs in the 90s'.
You're definitely right about all of this, but making money is certainly part of it as well. Not only can they make money from releasing a dub soundtrack, but sometimes foreign dubs will dub using the English dub as a base instead of the original Japanese. And American companies can charge a higher price for their dubs when it has original music in addition to pre-edited footage.
 

Starlight

Aurorae Lunares
May 31, 2009
1,528
2,161
1,665
Tankei Kingdom, Kinmoku
#50
Not sure if this is the best place to post this or not, but you can now buy a bootleg/unofficial t-shirt featuring Toon Maker!Sailor Moon and Luna on it over at AliExpress. Seems like this infamous incarnation is known even in China!
That's fan art from an American artist named Karen Amador who goes by the pseudonyms Ellador/Elladorine. She has an account on this forum as enigmawing. I remember her posting the same artwork in this thread. If anyone's interested in that T-shirt, I suggest buying it from her store on TeePublic.
 
Last edited:

Rika-Chicchi

Staff member
Site Admin
May 7, 2009
47,400
10,477
1,665
#52
Not sure if this is the best place to post this or not, but you can now buy a bootleg/unofficial t-shirt featuring Toon Maker!Sailor Moon and Luna on it over at AliExpress. Seems like this infamous incarnation is known even in China!
The designs of those other Sailor Moon T-shirts also look decent, BTW. :cool:
 

Memento

Stella Nova
Mar 8, 2012
6,141
8,178
1,665
underwatersphinx.blogspot.com
#54
Was just gonna make a post. Team Angel is a trip, definitely an interesting discovery. Honestly the whole article is bizarre and tragic. I hope the actual Sailor Moon proof-of-concept isn't lost forever. It turns 25 next year. It needs to come to light already.

If Naoko does attend Anime Expo next year, someone should ask her if she knows about/remembers this and what she thinks of it.

ETA: Is it just me or is Team Angel more PQ Angels-esque than Sailor Moon-esque? I'm definitely getting PQ Angels meets Wonder Woman meets Spice Girls meets Touched By an Angel meets Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders vibes from it.
 
Last edited:

Rika-Chicchi

Staff member
Site Admin
May 7, 2009
47,400
10,477
1,665
#55
Sep 6, 2014
3,386
3,687
1,665
#56
In 1993, before the magical girl anime Sailor Moon was released in the U.S., there was an alternate vision for it
Could have sworn it was 1994. Like I’m 99 percent sure it was 1994 when the Toonmaker Moon pilot was done


“Politically correct,” in the words of its creators, the proposed Sailor Moon would star Hispanic, black, and Asian Sailor Scouts,
They were all Asian in the anime. Making just one of them Asian isn’t exactly politcal correctness


It wasn’t until 1997, when Cartoon Network launched an anime programming block called Toonami, that anime began to resonate powerfully with American kids and teens
Anime was well known enough to have a anime monday block on sci fi. Far as I can tell Akira is actually attributed to starting the anime boom back in 1988. And there was a lot of popular anime cartoons between Astro Boy and what was on Toonami


It all got started one day in 1984, when kids’ TV producer Haim Saban was relaxing in a hotel room in Japan on business. He flicked through the channels playing game show after game show until, as he told the LA Times, he landed on something that caught his attention. “All of the sudden there were these five kids in spandex fighting monsters. Don’t ask me why, but I fell in love. It was so campy!”

The show was called Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, and after 8 years of rejections, Saban was finally able to bring it to the U.S. as Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
Zyuranger, the specific Sentai series that became the first season of Power Rangers didn’t exist in 1984. It was most likely Bio Man which also had a pilot made by Saban in the 1980s. The author of this article could have just said Super Sentai


Also, Ward said, Toei wouldn’t agree to change anything significant in the show for American audiences. “We could take that animation or not. I just said no.”
Somebody lied to him. See DiC dub.
 

Memento

Stella Nova
Mar 8, 2012
6,141
8,178
1,665
underwatersphinx.blogspot.com
#57
Could have sworn it was 1994. Like I’m 99 percent sure it was 1994 when the Toonmaker Moon pilot was done.
It was done in 1994. That's the year on the voice over script and the year the related copyrights were filed.


They were all Asian in the anime. Making just one of them Asian isn’t exactly political correctness.
They're all Asian in the anime because it's set in a country where 99% of the population is Asian, so that would be politically correct. Remaining politically correct while relocating the show to a country the demographics of which are more diverse requires changing the ethnicities of the principal characters.


Somebody lied to him. See DiC dub.
Perhaps Toei didn't regard the changes DiC made to be that extreme? But yeah, he was probably misinformed. (Or Toei changed its tune.)
 

Memento

Stella Nova
Mar 8, 2012
6,141
8,178
1,665
underwatersphinx.blogspot.com
#59
.................................what?

They're all clearly Japanese. Japanese people regard anime characters as Japanese (unless they are stated to be of / clearly have a different ethnicity). It's silly to say anime characters don't have races. And so what if two of the main characters are blonde? We also have characters with blue, purple, teal, and pink hair. It's called artistic license.
 

Masquerade

Solaris Luna
Nov 22, 2016
2,737
4,956
1,665
#60
.................................what?

They're all clearly Japanese. Japanese people regard anime characters as Japanese (unless they are stated to be of / clearly have a different ethnicity). It's silly to say anime characters don't have races. And so what if two of the main characters are blonde? We also have characters with blue, purple, teal, and pink hair. It's called artistic license.
I perceive Western cartoons as a lot more observant of character races than anime.
 
Likes: Starlight