The Bizarre Americanized Sailor Moon That Almost Was
As Sailor Moon celebrates the 30th anniversary of the anime, it's wild to think that the viewers in the United States almost got something so extremely different, it could barely be recognized compared to the original show. No, not the DIC dub nor the version that showed up on Toonami that contained a fair bit of censorship either — this was something entirely different.
It is known in the Sailor Moon fandom as Saban Moon and was set to be one-half live-action, one-half animation, and all kinds of Americanized oddness that made it extremely different from the series we all know and love today.
Related: Sailor Moon Parody To Be Screened At Queer Film Festival
Localizations of anime in the 90s were particularly notorious for censorship and strange choices. Many fans particularly remember how rice balls were called jelly donuts in the original Pokemon anime dub. It seems that television executives didn't believe that children could connect to shows created by people in Japan with such a differing culture.
So in 1993, an American studio called Toon Makers set out to make a 17-minute pilot of their own version of the popular franchise that was specifically designed for western audiences. Toon Makers was given temporarily granted adaptation rights to the series, and began to produce their pitch. They went on to produce a promotional music video, the full pilot, and had three other episodes in the works before the project was ultimately scrapped.
While there is limited information on the series, there are some notable differences able to be gleaned thanks to released animation cells as well as a script to the pilot episode of the series. One of the major choices Toon Works made was to diversify the cast. Sailor Mercury was set to be
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