Marcel Winatschek

Say The Magic Word

Sailor Moon was the show where everything mattered. Some weird creature was trying to destroy the world, and Bunny and her friends had to stop it, and it felt like life and death even though it was absolutely ridiculous. Then a song would start playing, and suddenly it actually was life and death. The music in that show was doing all the heavy lifting. The story was fine, the fights were fine, but when those songs came in—when you heard Force of Eternity or Only You Alone or whatever the German dub had called them—that’s when you felt something real.

Watching it on RTL2 as a kid was its own specific trauma. It was supposed to be a kids’ show, just another cartoon between programs, but you’d sit there absolutely wrecked while your parents walked past without understanding why. A group of teenagers in sailor suits saving the world shouldn’t have hit as hard as it did. The songs made it hit. There was something about the way those tracks would swell underneath a moment where one of the characters realized they couldn’t save everyone, or where they had to choose between their normal life and their duty—it made you believe that this actually mattered. This fake teenage girl drama actually mattered.

I remember specific songs doing specific damage. There was one about love, one about eternity, one about flying through clouds that felt impossibly sad even though I couldn’t explain why. I’d sit very still with my face pointing at the TV, which was probably the least subtle way to hide that I was tearing up at a show about magic girls. The German soundtrack had this melodramatic energy that actually worked. It leaned into the emotion instead of winking at the camera. It treated the material seriously, and that seriousness is what made it devastate you.

What’s strange about revisiting those songs now is that they still work. You can tell they were designed to hit you, to make you feel the weight of what these characters were doing. The production was cheap, the dialogue was sometimes silly, but whoever handled the music understood emotional manipulation in a way the rest of the show couldn’t quite touch. A violin melody, a swelling chorus, a moment where the song drops and you hear just the character’s voice—it’s basic technique, but it still works.

There were maybe ten or twelve of these tracks that did real damage, each one tied to a specific moment or just better produced than the rest. The weird part is that Sailor Moon probably didn’t invent this feeling—it just captured it and put it on television. There’s something about the story of people who have to sacrifice their normal lives for something bigger, who have to be brave even when they’re terrified, and when you pair that with the right music, it becomes something that lives in you. The show itself was fine. The songs were what made you care.