Still the Best Theme Song

The transformation sequence music from Sailor Moon is the best theme song ever written for a TV show. Twenty-five years later, I’m still convinced this is true. Those opening notes catch you the same way they caught you at nine years old, like they’re rewiring something in your brain that got set years ago.

Tokyo threw a concert for the anniversary, and they had these musicians—Mariko Terashita, Makoto Yoshida, and Kotono Mitsuishi among them—rework the songs with orchestral arrangements. Full strings, the kind of production you’d expect in a concert hall. Not remakes so much as resurrections. Hearing those melodies stripped down and rebuilt at that scale made me understand what I’d always felt without being able to articulate: these weren’t just anime songs. They were pop songs that happened to be soundtracking a show about girls saving the world.

The deeper cuts hit hardest. Heart Moving, Eternal Eternity—these are romance songs underneath the production, and placing them in that lush arrangement made something click. You realized the show was always doing more than it seemed to be doing. It was always about desire and choice and being wanted.

There’s a new film coming out in Japan this year, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal: Dream, and the fact that something this old keeps generating new content means either we’ve all collectively refused to grow up, or there’s something legitimately substantial buried in the bones of this show. Probably both. The transformation concept alone—the idea that you put on the suit and you become something—that’s a metaphor that doesn’t expire. It works for being a girl, being an artist, being anything that requires you to decide you’re going to do this thing.

The concert felt like watching something you loved as a kid get taken seriously without becoming self-important about it. The strings didn’t condescend. The arrangements didn’t wink at the audience. They just said: this music is good, and these feelings are real, and we’re going to play them in a concert hall because that’s what good music deserves.

I don’t know if I’ll ever shake the feeling that Sailor Moon is mine in some particular way. Probably not. And probably that’s fine.