It might be easy for younger fans of anime to take for granted the fact that they have access to the original versions of the shows they watch. Growing up in the 1990s, I remember when anime was getting its foothold in American pop culture with the likes of Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, Pokémon and more pertinently to this column: Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon was the first of the above mentioned series to get dubbed into English and to gain popularity (Dragon Ball received an earlier Harmony Gold dub, but this one was fairly unknown compared to 1996’s dub of Dragon Ball Z). The dub was intended to run for only six-months, but would run for five years due to its popularity with audiences. What many at the time weren’t aware of was the unaired pilot that would’ve used its own original animation (mixed with live action) instead of merely putting out a dub.

This pilot was considered a piece of lost media and while it has been often talked about in many circles online with a two-minute music video which contained footage of the pilot was shown at Anime Expo in 1998 being the only artifact of its existence.

The pilot recently resurfaced for a lot of people through YouTube videos uploaded earlier this year on the topic by YouTuber Ray Mona including one entitled “The Western World of Sailor Moon”.

Let’s back up and look at this from the beginning.

Sailor Moon was a manga created by Naoko Takeuchi that focused on middle-school student Usagi Tsukino who, after meeting a talking black cat named Luna, gains the ability to become Sailor Moon, one of the Sailor Guardians tasked battling the evil Queen Beryl and her Dark Kingdom. Usagi would be joined by various other Sailor Guardians (all named after the planets in the solar system…and Pluto) and the mysterious rose tossing Tuxedo Kamen.

In summation, the show was basically if Sabrina the Teenage Witch met Power Rangers; an example that is extremely fitting when you consider that the Sailor Guardians are more or less inspired by Super Sentai, the series that Power Rangers routinely lifts footage from.

The English version of the show would make strides to Americanize the series including name changes: Usagi became Serena, Tuxedo Kamen became Tuxedo Mask, Sailor Guardians became Sailor Scouts etc. Some changes even included flipping the footage so that the cars appeared to be driving on the opposite sides of the road; and of course the more infamous changes to censor LBGTQ elements such as changing the male character Zoisite to a woman due to his relationship with other male character Kunzite (whose named was changed to Malachite for some reason, guess they felt the mineral name puns weren’t that obvious), as well as changing Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune from lovers to cousins to explain their closeness (unsuccessfully I might add as now the whole thing raises even more questions).

Indeed, these changes were pretty common with the dubs of anime series in the 90s, after all there are a lot of cultural differences that producers felt would confuse viewers. After all, the whole “sailor” part of the name doesn’t make a lot of sense if you aren’t familiar with the sailor fuku uniforms that Japanese students wear.

As mentioned above, there was an attempt at a pilot with original footage by Toon Makers Inc that would’ve aired in 1994.

Plans for this adaptation went back all the way to 1993 with both Bandai and Toei animation wanting to introduce the series to a Western audience. This approach involved a series featuring live action actresses playing the character and they would transform into animated characters for those sequences.

So how was the pilot? Not good. The answer is not good.

I decided to hunt it down and watch the pilot and I can safely say that a bullet was dodged.

The pilot in the broadest of strokes was similar to the original series including elements like Queen Beryl as the villain (who was going to be played by Adrienne Barbeau), and the Sailor Guardians would have the same names (Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Moon). Some of the changes include turning Luna into a white cat (combining her character with the character Artemis), as well as the use of these weird, flying boards with sails on them that were no doubt included to have the whole “sailor” thing make sense.

Watching the pilot might’ve been one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had to endure (and I watched Morbius earlier this year). After an opening theme that went on for nearly two and a half minutes. Not that the song was terrible (not really great either), but lacks the oomph that the one they eventually went with would have (and that cool guitar riff).

The show begins with some narration about the various kingdoms on different planets which sounds like it is going for what was shown in the manga. The Moon Kingdom is then abruptly (and I mean like 30 seconds in) attacked by the Dark Kingdom with people escaping on a….ugh…space galleon (boy they were really trying to make that sailor thing work).

After a brief fight, we cut to some live action with the civilian identities of the girls getting ready for a dance in a sequence of events that felt like the mad fever dreams of every 90s girl commercial cliche in the book. Following that bit of monotony, we go back to more monotony as the girls transform into cartoon characters to fight some villains in space.

The live action to cartoon and back decision seems to be the most baffling part of this, the logic of which I don’t understand. Surely, it would’ve been far more simple to do it entirely animated or in live action, but not together. Granted, while DiC has had some good stuff, they clearly didn’t have the a-team on animation duty for this as it looks like a knock-off She-Ra. This animation isn’t helped at all by the dead, fish-eyed stare of the titular heroine in her animated form. So after watching this 12 minute pilot and mourning those 12 minutes of my life I can never have back, I can safely say that DiC made the right choice in abandoning the pilot in favor of a simple dub of the original series.

So that is the weird story of how Sailor Moon almost had a completely different pilot. Honestly, I don’t think it would’ve took off the way it did with audiences at the time the same way the original did, and it might have ended up on the pile of forgotten 90s animated media like Fish Police, Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys, or Biker Mice from Mars (bonus points to you if you remember those by the way).

Next week we get into my favorite time of the year with the Halloween season and a look at monster movies all month long.