Fifteen Years Is a Long Time to Wait for the Moon

Twenty years is long enough to forget the transformation sequence and then, without warning, remember every frame of it. The pirouette. The ribbons. The sailor collar materializing out of light. I was a kid when I first watched Sailor Moon and apparently some part of me never stopped waiting for it to come back, because the announcement of a new series—July 2014, twentieth anniversary—hit harder than anything involving moon prisms and a talking cat had any right to hit.

Meanwhile, Game of Thrones fans were staging a collective grief performance over a ten-month wait between seasons. Ten months. Some of us had been sitting with this particular absence for the better part of two decades. I offer this without further comment.

The show with the moon prisms and the talking cat and the transformation sequences and Tuxedo Mask throwing roses at structural problems and the lesbian sailor scouts and the school arcades and the ski trips and so many evil queens that Tokyo should probably have standing emergency protocols by now—that show was coming back. Producer Atsutoshi Umezawa was careful to frame it as neither continuation nor remake but a new interpretation of Naoko Takeuchi’s original manga, which is actually where the more interesting material lives. The nineties anime drifted far from Takeuchi’s source—padded with filler arcs, softened at the edges, given a different rhythm. Going back to the manga promised something leaner and stranger, closer to what she actually drew.

What I really wanted was for someone to just clear an entire afternoon block on some network and run Sailor Moon back-to-back with Monster Rancher, Digimon, and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water until everyone remembered what that particular era of Saturday afternoons felt like. That was almost certainly not going to happen. But July was something. Fifteen years is a long time to wait for the moon to come back around, and I was ready.