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Watch Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal Online




Usagi is a little clumsy and a crybaby, but she's also one spirited eigth grader. One day she meets Luna, a black cat with a crescent mark on her forehead, and transforms into the pretty sailor-suited guardian of love and justice, Sailor Moon! As a chosen guardian of justice, Usagi apparently has a mission to protect a princess, and to find her fellow Guardians and the Legendary Silver Crystal. Meanwhile, Queen Beryl of the Dark Kingdom sends her subordinates to the town where Usagi lives. They cause strange events to occur there, all in an effort to acquire the tremendously powerful Silver Crystal.

Can Sailor Moon and the other Guardians successfully find the Legendary Silver Crystal, and protect the princess?

I’m not even close to kidding when I say that one of the most exciting things about life in 2014 is that we’re experiencing an amazing renaissance of Sailor Moon. Not only has the manga been reissued in its entirety from Kodansha, and not only is the classic series being released uncut with two episodes every Monday on Hulu, but Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal, a new series based on Naoko Takeuchi‘s original series, made its worldwide premiere last weekend.

This is, for someone who loves Sailor Moon as much as I do, a pretty big deal, and Crystal‘s first episode lived up to the hype by being an absolutely gorgeous new version of Usagi’s first outing as Sailor Moon. The thing is, Crystal was designed to be a far more strict adaptation of the source material, and while it definitely succeeds on that front, that’s also its biggest problem.

Crystal represents the fourth version of Sailor Moon’s first adventure — in which she oversleeps, meets a talking cat, gets super-powers and battles her friend Naru’s mother, who has been replaced by a monster who sucks energy out of people by selling them affordable jewelry — that I’ve seen in the past six months. With the original 1992 anime coming back out, I’ve been excited enough to dive back into the manga, too, and I even ended up watching the live-action tokusatsu version that was made back in 2003, and they all lead off with this story.

On one level, that’s understandable, since it’s basically the anime equivalent of Uncle Ben getting shot or baby Superman being shoved into a rocketship and shot headfirst into Kansas, but at the same time, it invites comparisons, and unfortunately, Crystal‘s version comes in at fourth place.

My least favorite version of a Sailor Moon story is still going to be something that I like more than like 90% of other things in the world, but still. And really, when you get right down to it, it’s not actually all Crystal‘s fault. As frustrating as this might be to the Sailor Scout purists among you, Takeuchi’s original manga has always been the version of Sailor Moon that I like the least. The manga has a lot going for it with its wispy figures and instantly engaging characters, but the anime wasn’t just the first version I ever encountered, it’s also justifiably iconic and has voice acting that really holds up — probably the reason that Kotono Mitsuishi was brought back to reprise her role as Usagi 22 years after she voiced the original series. The live-action version, of course, has a Luna Puppet, and is therefore amazing all on its own merits.

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