Friday, June 17th, 11:40 pm
Update
- Jay Navok
Risk Management
The State of
the Senshi Address (2005)
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Ever since the clock struck midnight to make it 2005, Usagi's been
feeling like only half the woman she used to be. |
Before we begin, to celebrate our two-year anniversary,
we're giving away five free forums accounts. Several of last year's winners
have been some of our top contributors to the forums, and we're hoping this
year we'll get a new crop of great posters.
But we're not making it easy. Here are five questions. If
you think you know the answer to one,
e-mail it to us,
stating which question you're answering.
1. Dr. Xadium asks: What was the name of the waltz
that Professor Tomoe wrote in his youth and when was the first time it
was used in the series? Tip: it was used before the S season. Question answered.2. Lunar
Archivist asks: Name the professions of the sailor soldiers'
fathers. Tip: not all are known. Question answered.
3. Jay asks: What was the name
of the youma Professor Tomoe created in the Sailor Moon S Sound Drama
CD? Question answered.
4. Forum member Hades Impact asks:
In Stars, when Chibi Chibi first sees Usagi,
Usagi is wearing clothing first seen in what episode? Hint: It's
an episode in the SuperS season. Question answered.
5. A hand-out for those who have read WoL: What
fortress was precedence for the Crystal Palaces' pentagram shape?
Question anwered.
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Two years and several hundred articles
later, with 2005 halfway over, it feels like little has changed since I wrote the
first article for this website. Yet so much in the Sailor Moon
multiverse has changed since 2003.
In the last two years we’ve seen some unexpected things
in Japan. The rise of the live action series, the revision of the manga, the
release of the anime on DVD, the winding down of the myu. When I think back
on it, I’m amazed that we covered so much in such a short period of time. If
you look at just the facts- a series back on the airwaves, manga back on store
shelves, home videos selling, the 2003-2005 period looks identical to how
the series was in 1992-1997.
That’s a fantastic accomplishment; and sadly it reached
crescendo too quickly. My regret is that the revived impact of the series
was far less than it could have been. Although it’s interesting to see that
street sellers are still hawking Sailor Moon goods (http://masamania.com/archives/2005/06/yatai_tell_you.html#more
scroll down), the extent to which the revamped series captured the national imagination
(something we discuss in the conclusion to
Warriors of Legend – plug
plug!) has been remote in comparison.
While Japan was having this mini-Sailor Moon
renaissance, we in North America received nothing. It’s been two years of
silence.
But I’ve said this all before.
Last year I still had some hope that the live action
series would be licensed and brought here. Now things are totally up in the
air. People have been speculating that Toei had a master plan for North
America- let the series expire then do a rollout under their own umbrella.
Some of the resistance we encountered with WoL leads us to believe
the opposite; I don’t know if they have any plan at all. I think they just
want to focus on the series that they’ve decided to release on their own
(stuff like Slam Dunk) and consider- as with others in the industry-
Sailor Moon to be washed up here.
It’s hard to tell. A year ago I thought I had a better
understanding of what was going to happen, but now it’s far too vague.
I can say one thing with conviction, though: Toei is
out to make money. They’re not out to keep Sailor Moon away from
Americans out of some sort of Japan-pride nonsense. If they thought the
series could make a profit here, that is to say, that it would be worth
their investment (which could be in the tens of millions) to
rerelease it here, they would do it in a heartbeat. But there’s a general
cynicism in the air, which hasn’t been helped by the fact that Slam Dunk
sales have sunk harder than the Jackson prosecutor’s ego.
Odds are they want to focus on “fresh” commodities that
can capture the interest of those kids who watch Toonami. With the American
anime boom of several years ago over we have a bloated anime market. The
home-dvd audience that isn’t growing (and perhaps is getting smaller) and
faces fierce competition from bootlegs; any risk they take is a high one
indeed.
Perhaps it’s not worth it. Would a Sailor Moon
branded product still do well in the North American marketplace? It’s a
question we might have answered has we been given the license, but alas,
that was not to be. We’ve been happy with the initial response we received
to WoL, some wonderful coverage that showed that something with the
Sailor Moon name in its subtitle could still make headlines. But
whether that translates to success is very uncertain.
We just don't know what will happen, but we're hoping
things will turn out alright. If there's anything Sailor Moon teaches,
its that one should never give up hope- especially when it comes to the show
itself.
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The colors, Duke, the colors! |
Let’s turn to another subject, which is this here
Soapbox, Genvid’s editorial page.
Wikipedia says: “A soapbox is a raised, improvised platform on which one
stands to make an impromptu speech...” Now we’d call it a blog. It was
always funny to me when I received e-mails complaining of us having "opinions"
in articles, on a website called The Sailor Moon Soapbox.
Since last October we’ve been on an irregular update
schedule. I should be able to continue updating through the summer, although
we can't go back to daily form. Near the beginning of the year I mentioned that there
would be some changes to this website and that perhaps the Soapbox
would come to an end. The plan was for Dr. Xadium to take over and rework
things into a data emporium of sorts, but that’s currently on hiatus.
Instead, the Soapbox will go on at least through the end of this
year.
We never planned for the Soapbox to be anything other
than a bi-weekly editorial page, and it’s become something quite different.
But it’s been an amusing two years. One of my favorites in the ludicrous
department is the tall tale that we got Chisaki to close her site to
non-Japanese visitors. This absolutely hilarious story goes as follows: since we
had been making fun of her, she decided to retaliate by preventing
non-Japanese IPs from visiting her website.
Even we don’t have egos massive enough to believe that
this girl, who was a full-time actress, a middle school student, and
studying for her high school exams during this period, had enough
free time to sit around on the internet reading webpages about herself,
in another language no less (because she clearly understands English
fluently and reads the New York Times everyday) and then, upset at what she
read at our site (which she obviously read fervently), was so petty
that she decided to get revenge by preventing non-Japanese from
reading her website, which she certainly had administrative control over
because- as she was Sailor Mecury- she was a web genius. To actually believe
this one has to create a web of remote, hypothetical situations whose actual
potential of all having occurred and thus making this the truth is so astronomical
that the odds are better for me becoming the President of China tomorrow
than that having been the case.
Nevermind that it made perfect sense for her to shut
non-Japanese IPs, which was a needless bandwidth drain from a market that
she wasn’t trying to attract. Nevermind the fact that it’s horribly
Eurocentric to believe that she understood English well and thus would, of
course, look up, read, and care about what Westerners were saying about her.
The fact is, all celebrities spend a lot of time on the internet, just like
whoever concocted this, and these celebrities care and read what people
writing in other languages say
about them: Britney Spears, who speaks better Japanese than I, regularly
goes to 2chan to check out what the Japanese say about her and cries when
they are mean!
It always amazes me the extent to which the human
imagination can invent something and then repeat it enough times to think
even the most fantastic of things is true. By the way, did you know that the
Moon landing was faked?
I think that one takes the cake but there are plenty of
more zany rumors spread about that bring us infinite laughter. Ah, if Sailor Moon fans are anything it’s
imaginative.
That imagination can be a very good thing. We're always
delighted by some of the inventive things we see at ours and other forums, from
photoshops to music videos. I can see online doujinshi, along the lines of what
Dr. Xadium does with his comics, taking over the role of fanfics in the future.
From some of the works we've seen at Deviant art and other places, Sailor
Moon fans have the creativity and skills to pull such comics off. If things
like that catch on in popularity, it has a chance to keep online Sailor Moon
fandom afloat.
I leave to Japan the first week of October. I hope to
be able to continue things while I’m there, but I don’t know what my
schedule or connection will be like. So October is up in the air but we
ought to be able to continue until then and after then. I'll be able to
provide a lot more Japan coverage in the years I'm there.
In the meantime, we will also be working on the next
installment in the Warriors of Legend series which we hope we’ll be
able to put out. It'll revolutionize fandom's understanding of
Sailor Moon.
But for now, an important message from Sawai Miyuu:
The sign says that she'll punish train gropers, in the name
of the moon.
...I'd better get gropin'.
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