Sailor Moon at Twenty

There’s a particular kind of aging-feeling that comes from realizing Sailor Moon turned twenty this year. The series, I mean—not Usagi herself. Though if she’d actually aged alongside the show instead of staying forever fourteen, she’d be thirty-four now. Thirty-four. That math sits differently depending on when you think about it.

The Japanese haven’t let it rest. New anime seasons, merchandise, a memorial album with contemporary pop stars rerecording the old theme songs. Tommy heavenly6, Momoiro Clover Z, artists I’ve maybe never heard of—all singing versions of music that soundtracked Saturday mornings or late-night reruns for anyone who caught the right era. The new takes are competent enough. The originals had texture you can’t recreate—the specific budget constraints of 90s anime, the earnestness, that particular sound. But there’s something to the fact that people keep reworking it, that it’s worth pressing onto new media, worth remaking.

It means something lasted. It means a story about girls in tiaras fighting darkness for love and justice still carries enough weight that people feel compelled to reinterpret it. That probably matters more than whether the new songs are any good.