Have you always wanted to share the silly fun of Sailor Moon with your geeklings? Now's your chance! 23 episodes of the original, newly re-dubbed anime are now available online through Viz Media and Hulu.If you suffered through the Sailor Moon DiC dub in the 90s, you'll find things are different now. In Viz's new dub, character names now match the manga. Sorry, Serena! The voice acting seems to be higher quality, with an admirable effort at matching the animated mouth movements without rushing the dialogue too much to fit the words in. Usagi is appropriately cute and whiny without being grating; my five-year-old commented more than once, "Sailor Moon is hilarious!"
The opening and ending songs, as well as the background and transformation music, remain unchanged and undubbed, which made me happy as an anime watcher who prefers subs over dubs. (I'm a sub snob.)
1 This article is a bit of an experiment. Never covered manga and related on Pipedot before. If you're interested in this topic, speak up; if you're not I probably won't submit similar articles since they're not really my cup of tea.
Anime fan-subbing is perhaps the world's largest subtitling community. With high quality releases of popular titles mere days after airing, the fan-subbed versions often far surpass the quality of the eventual commercial release.
But what about the legality of fan-subs? Well... the content industry shot itself in the foot on that front. When digital video came out (LaserDisk, DVD, Bluray, etc) the industry divided the world into different "regions." U.S. and Canada are region 1, Japan and Europe are region 2, and Australia and South America are stuck in region 4. The idea being, they can charge different prices for the same content to different areas of the world. Charging higher prices to wealthier countries is, of course, illegal under free trade agreements - but something being illegal never stopped the content industry! However, this also brings up a small window of time, where a work is released in region 2, but not available for purchase in region 1. During this window, animation companies normally turn a blind eye to fan-subbing groups - as long as they promise to cease distribution once the official commercial license is finalized.