Sailor Moon Reboot – Keeping it Real
With the announcement that our childhood favourite anime Sailor Moon would be getting a serious reboot series to celebrate its 20th anniversary, fans everywhere lost their minds and soon lost them again when the series was pushed back to this summer. Sailor Moon was a life changing anime for many young girls in terms of its feminist views and “camp” themes. It was also the series that sky rocketed the popularity of the magical girl genre.
According to AnimeNewsNetwork.com the reboot will be airing in Japan in July, but more importantly then the release date was the announcement made by producer Atsutoshi Umezawa that this will be reboot not a remake nor a continuation but a series that will stay true to the original manga series by Naoko Takeuchi. This may not mean much to those who did not stray from the dub we were all used to here but to hard core fans and the LGBT community that enjoyed the show it is a piece of ground breaking news. The dubbed series was designed to be child-friendly for kids growing up in the 90s, so they turned what was romantic relationships into platonic ones and even went as far as to change a characters gender.
Staying true to the manga means that the original narratives for some of the characters are going to be restored. Looking at the most famous change that took place in the dub of the third season “Sailor Moon S” is when Haruka and Michiru or Sailor Uranus and Neptune were changed from being a lesbian couple into “cousins”, a slightly disturbing change considering their gestures and relationship in the series. What’s worse for the kids to see; a lesbian couple or an incestuous relationship? Priorities were slightly askew there. Even in the first season, although not as obvious as Neptune and Uranus, there was the issue of altering Zoisite from a man to a woman because he was clearly the more feminine of the two characters thus changing his 
relationship with Malachite from a gay one to a hetero one.
We lost out on the very final season since the US decided not to dub it for being even more “queer” than the previous four with the addition of the gender-bending “Sailor Starlights”. Let’s hope we will see an appearance from them in the reboot.
Thankfully we are finally getting the chance to see our favourite “fighting evil by moonlight” magical girls all rebooted and ready to kick some butt! Although we won’t see the outer senshi or Neptune and Uranus until much later in the series but we can be pleased with seeing how Zoisite and Malachites relationship is portrayed early in the series. For now we will just have to sit and wait for July while enjoying the delight of the new age Magical girl series that were inspired by Sailor Moon.
