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Exclusive Interview: Viz Media's Charlene Ingram and Josh Lopez on Sailor Moon


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Phibby



Joined: 14 Jun 2005
Posts: 87
Location: MS, US
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 2:13 am Reply with quote
LUNI_TUNZ wrote:
I was speaking figuratively.

I know Moon had 3 voice actors, but no one thinks of Tracey Moore's rather bland interpretation when you talk about Moon, and Linda Ballantyne was basically made to imitate Terri Hawkes' performance.

That whole bit was basically their attempt to quell expectations about people's favorite voice actors returning.


My mistake, then. Though it's interesting that you say that considering PurpleWarrior13's thoughts at the top of page 6:

PurpleWarrior13 wrote:
...but I also really enjoyed Tracey Moore, Karen Bernstein, Emilie Barlow (as Venus, although her Mars was good too), Vince Corazza, Stephanie Beard, and Ron Rubin. Terri Hawkes, Linda Ballantyne, Liza Balkan, Stephanie Morgenstern, and Tracey Hoyt? Not so much. Ballantyne at least had a very cheerful voice that I got used to, but both her and Hawkes just sounded far too mature for Usagi. Tracey Moore had a innocent quality to her voice that sounded carefree, and very youthful. It was a damn shame she only had 13 episodes with the character. She was awesome, and really the only great voice the character had.


I actually think of both Terri Hawkes and Tracey Moore when I think of Usagi (after Mitsuishi Kotono, of course). Terri just because she dubbed the majority of the first two seasons, and Tracey because she dubbed the individual dub episodes I've seen the most: the first episode and the cruise ship episode that was on the one SM tape my 10-year-old self owned before Pioneer released the movies subbed, haha. I'm surprised that thing made it through my childhood in one piece.

Although I don't dislike Terri Hawkes' performance, I also think that she sounded a bit too mature for the part, and for that reason I prefer Tracey Moore, who nailed the ditzy teenage pitch first season Usagi should have. I can't speak to Linda Ballantyne since I never watched S or SuperS dubbed.

I'll grant that the fanbase as a whole would name Terri Hawkes as the "one" Sailor Moon, but that doesn't mean that inconsistent casting is an unreasonable criticism of the first English dub.

I'm honestly fine with none of the original English VAs returning, though I also would not mind it if some did (I'll always love Katie Griffin as Mars, I gotta say). I'm certainly not expecting any of them to, considering it's been almost 20(!) years since the DiC dub and I'm sure most of the VAs have moved on or retired since then.

I'm not really planning on watching the new dub myself, though I'm sure I'll watch an episode or two just to hear the new VAs. I'm just glad a dub will exist that I can purchase outside of eBay or Amazon Marketplace. I don't have any children of my own, but I have two coworkers with 7-year-old daughters that I would love to introduce to the show.
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Sevenfeet



Joined: 18 May 2014
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 8:47 am Reply with quote
Phibby wrote:

I'm honestly fine with none of the original English VAs returning, though I also would not mind it if some did (I'll always love Katie Griffin as Mars, I gotta say). I'm certainly not expecting any of them to, considering it's been almost 20(!) years since the DiC dub and I'm sure most of the VAs have moved on or retired since then.

I'm not really planning on watching the new dub myself, though I'm sure I'll watch an episode or two just to hear the new VAs. I'm just glad a dub will exist that I can purchase outside of eBay or Amazon Marketplace. I don't have any children of my own, but I have two coworkers with 7-year-old daughters that I would love to introduce to the show.


I think most of the principal voice actors for this show are in the 50's or late 40's. All of them seem to still be working in the business. The issue comes down to being able to produce a credible voice of a teenager when you are firmly in middle age. But I've seen recent interviews with both Katie Griffin and Susan Roman and it sounds like they both still have "it", as it were.

As many know, the VA business is pretty tough to make a living on, so the one's who have done it for a long time are generally pretty well respected. Most of the principals for Sailor Moon live and work in Canada, but with modern recording techniques, location for this kind of work is less of an issue these days. Most of the time it centers on money and other commitments. I think few would just say, "You know, I'm over doing that" since it's, after all, income. The one VA I can think of who actually retired from a role rather than reprise it was Petrea Burchard who declined reprising Ryoko in the third Tenchi Muyo OVA.
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Cutiebunny



Joined: 18 Apr 2010
Posts: 1746
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 8:55 am Reply with quote
Shiroi Hane wrote:
People have original cels to trade because the studios [url=]got rid of them. Other materials aren't always treated much better and, even with the best of intentions, may not have held up well (remember how much time, money and effort they had to spend restoring the negatives for even something huge like Star Wars?)


It depends on the production and studio. There was a lot of "dumpter diving" back in the 1990s, which is how a large portion of the cels survived. A lot of artwork was, and still largely is, smuggled out of the studio. I can think of several sellers on Yahoo Japan that earn quite a bit of cash selling "smuggled" artwork. Though, the current trend seems to be that studios are burning the artwork now.

In Sailor Moon and Dragonball's case, Toei did sell some of the artwork. The earliest "officially" sold Toei Sailor Moon cels came in a Toei envelope, while the later ones were just packaged in plastic bags and sealed with a Toei sticker. The majority of cels that exist in collections today were never "officially" sold, so while they are legitimate items, they made it out of the studio by non-official channels.

Regarding Sailor Moon being transferred to film - During the Sailor Moon R season (1993), a popular item released by Toei were bookmarks featuring clips from the 16mm film reels. When I went to the Toei museum in 2008, they gave these things out with your ticket.
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EmperorBrandon
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 04 Oct 2002
Posts: 2209
Location: Springfield, MO
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:12 am Reply with quote
EmperorBrandon wrote:
Ojamajo LimePie wrote:
When you say "everything", does this include the next episode previews?
Hmm... I'm curious about that too. Sure hope so.

They're included in the Hulu stream, so good to go there it seems.
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EmperorBrandon
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 04 Oct 2002
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Location: Springfield, MO
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:30 am Reply with quote
Ojamajo LimePie wrote:

The pre-episode previews are missing, though. Good grief.

They are there, but they are after the opening.
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Blanchimont



Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3426
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:33 am Reply with quote
aers wrote:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/75369

I'm glad they removed all that grain that was coincidentally in straight lines making this roof look like it had tiles instead of being on fire.

... ... Please tell me that degrained one is from the old DVD release, and not the new. Pretty please?
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EmperorBrandon
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 04 Oct 2002
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Location: Springfield, MO
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:41 am Reply with quote
Blanchimont wrote:

... ... Please tell me that degrained one is from the old DVD release, and not the new. Pretty please?

It's from the Hulu stream (Neon Alley logo is there at the bottom left).
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Sevenfeet



Joined: 18 May 2014
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:42 am Reply with quote
I know we're being all happy about Sailor Moon coming back and being uncut and uncensored, but if I may say something heretical here, there is one thing I didn't mind getting ditched by DiC.

Let's face it, transformation scenes are goofy, and for the most part, it's the same scene over and over. "I am Sailor Moon, champion of stock footage!" You hold up a pretty stick/brooch and say "Moon Prism Power" or something and then say "Make Up!"

Really? "Make Up"??? Yeah I know, the target demo for this cartoon was originally 8-14 year old girls. Yes, teenaged girls are starting to care about such stuff like makeup. But still, as a part of a super powered transformation sequence, its still pretty silly and sexist (and that's on top of the actual sailor fuku costume). And it makes even less sense when you get the older Sensei like Uranus and Neptune doing it (*especially* the very butch Uranus) or Pluto, who's a grownup for goodness sake.

OK, flame off. Had to get that off my chest. Laughing
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Ojamajo LimePie



Joined: 09 Nov 2007
Posts: 762
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:46 am Reply with quote
EmperorBrandon wrote:
Ojamajo LimePie wrote:

The pre-episode previews are missing, though. Good grief.

They are there, but they are after the opening.


Oh, they must have just removed the "new series" preview from episode 1. Would it kill Viz to switch things around to the proper order?
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Sevenfeet



Joined: 18 May 2014
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 11:54 am Reply with quote
walw6pK4Alo wrote:
Ojamajo LimePie wrote:
If Sailor Moon followed the same production process as DBZ, it was recorded on 16mm film then transferred onto Betacam master tapes for storage and distribution.


What I can't believe is when people (including the Viz rep) use "but it's a 1992 anime!" as a defense for a godawful upscale, as if low budget 16mm TV anime that are even older haven't already had presentable BluRay releases.

"But it's a 1902 film!"
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/A-Trip-to-the-Moon-Blu-ray/36593/
isn't even an excuse. So it can only be lack of proper materials on which to work.


Despite a show being popular and iconic, sometimes the original source materials were treated poorly or they were mastered on media that doesn't age well. This is not just a problem with TV based anime...it happens a lot for sometimes very popular works. When George Lucas wanted to do a special edition of the original Star Wars, they discovered that all of the film copies that they had on hand had been played so many times that their quality was awful. They got lucky in that they managed to find one copy at Lucasfilm that had barely been played since the premiere in 1977. It's that copy that became the new "master" and the one that is being actively preserved now.

But then there's the issue of how shows were being produced in that era. mid-80's to early 90's TV was often produced and distributed on video...3/4" Betacam tapes. Some of the most well known expensive TV shows in Hollywood were actually shot on video like this. If you ever see clips of the Cosby Show, it all looks like crap since the show was produced on 480p video, not film (which can be restored and digitally scanned up to 4K). Star Trek: The Original Series from the 1960s looks great on Blu-Ray mainly because they had the original 35mm film stock from Desilu to work with. On the other hand, Star Trek: The Next Generation from the 1980s had to deal with the fact that the show was on video which made cleanup and upscaling harder and special effects downright crappy (the effects were reshot for the Blu-Ray release).

I'd be real surprised if there was a quality surviving 16mm film stock of this series that could be properly restored. On the other hand, cleanup of old video stock is a lot better now than a decade ago (again, refer to ST:TNG's Blu-Ray release). So I'm sure that while we're probably not going to get the quality of film restoration of a cartoon say from the 50's-70's, it will be better on a variety of levels from the DVD releases of a decade ago.
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 25 Oct 2003
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Location: Wales
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 1:47 pm Reply with quote
Not a smudge fan wrote:

Have you really created an account specifically to post images of Schwarzenegger?

Cutiebunny wrote:
During the Sailor Moon R season (1993), a popular item released by Toei were bookmarks featuring clips from the 16mm film reels. When I went to the Toei museum in 2008, they gave these things out with your ticket.

Well there you go. Unless those were internegatives rather than the original film masters, that would definitely make doing a HD remaster from film a difficult prospect...
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Sevenfeet



Joined: 18 May 2014
Posts: 13
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 2:27 pm Reply with quote
Shiroi Hane wrote:


Cutiebunny wrote:
During the Sailor Moon R season (1993), a popular item released by Toei were bookmarks featuring clips from the 16mm film reels. When I went to the Toei museum in 2008, they gave these things out with your ticket.

Well there you go. Unless those were internegatives rather than the original film masters, that would definitely make doing a HD remaster from film a difficult prospect...


I just sat and watched Episode 1 over lunch on Hulu. It looks like exactly what we thought....an upscaled, digitally cleaned, color balanced version of the old Betacam videotapes. Whatever 16mm film that existed was either unavailable, lost or too damaged to use. It's impossible to bring out detail in an upscale and you can tell the places on line curves when upscales happen. Upscaling plus compression artifacts are a bit annoying to watch, but I'm thinking the Blu-Ray release will suffer from fewer artifacts vs. Hulu.

Having said that, the video is probably the best I've seen of it since the original syndication run. I'm comparing the video versus the a torrent copy I have (hey, this show has been out of print for a decade) and the big difference is the colors. NTSC video has a limited amount of colors and it's likely the originally painted colors never translated that well to NTSC video. HD has a far broader palette, so if Viz had access to the original color palette information, they can make something a lot truer to what the animators intended. One complaint is that in some scenes the color saturations goes overboard to the point of bleeding. I might have dialed it back just a bit from what they did in certain places. I imagine that since they probably produced the shows in order that the later episodes will look better than Episode 1.

The one thing about this cleaned up Sailor Moon is that loads better is the soundtrack. The copy I have is a highly compressed, extremely tinny soundtrack that is awful to listen to. This one, while still likely a studio mono is still heads and shoulders up what has been out there (I don't have the ADV version to compare to).
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Anton Chigurh



Joined: 03 Dec 2007
Posts: 257
Location: Guam
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 2:38 pm Reply with quote
The scene in the third (?) season with Usagi crawling into a phone booth after a particularly traumatic incident and crying - not her usual bawling, genuinely crying - has remained with me since.

I think I will get the Limited Edition.

On the softer side of things, no series I know has let the audience take a peek at the future queen of the Earth's underwear drawer. That counts for something too.
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DavidShallcross



Joined: 19 Feb 2008
Posts: 1008
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 2:46 pm Reply with quote
AtoMan wrote:
The megabytes lost aren't that big of an issue, but with these bars ypu effectively limit the picture size from 720x480 to 540x480... for a HD remaster. How dumb is that?


Are you saying that they are taking the original 480-line 4:3 aspect ratio image, digitized as a 720 x 480 image (with skinny pixels), squashing it down to 540 x 480, and adding black side pillars to fill up the 720 x 480 standard DVD image, so that when displayed as anamorphic widescreen (with wide pixels), it appears at the 4:3 aspect ratio, but less horizontal resolution that it would have if it were displayed as the 720 x 480 non-anamorphic image?
That's almost hard to believe.
I would want verification from somebody with a 4:3 television.

I suppose it makes some kind of economic sense. If the DVD version is a downconversion from the Blu-Ray version, it saves them some duplicated effort.

Otherwise, 4:3 ratio material should be watched in 4:3, and not stretched or chopped to fit 16:9, in my opinion.

edit I had assumed square pixels for standard def NTSC digital video, but now see that they use rectangular pixels, taller than wide.


Last edited by DavidShallcross on Mon May 19, 2014 3:43 pm; edited 2 times in total
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KabaKabaFruit



Joined: 20 Sep 2007
Posts: 1869
Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba
PostPosted: Mon May 19, 2014 3:06 pm Reply with quote
Keeping tabs with this news and interview. Will follow.
Sevenfeet wrote:
Somebody earlier commented that they would rather not have the original DIC cast back. I take the opposite approach in that the original voice actors' work is a large part of why the DIC production resonated with the original viewers. Sailor Moon was on the air in the US before Cartoon Network began showing it. It was in syndication in many markets. It was this presentation that I first saw 15 years ago to the month when I had inadvertently left my TV on overnight in my apartment bedroom only to wake up at 6 AM with this bizarre show in front of me. I was too tired to change the channel, so I began watching it and before I knew it, I'd finished the episode. The next morning, the exact same thing happened...I woke up to the show by accident and by day three I was hooked. Like many of us, it was my first anime that wasn't named Voltron or Speed Racer and proved to be my "gateway drug" into other series like Ranma and Tenchi Muyo back then.

As time went on, I grew to appreciate the performances. This was not a cheap fan dub effort since the idea was to pitch this to independent TV stations looking for kids programming. Katie Griffin's Mars and Susan Roman's Jupiter reminded me a lot of older, more mature versions of Peanuts characters Lucy and Peppermint Patty, respectively. I've always loved Stephanie Morganstern's Venus although it's hard for me to explain why. Sailor V was the original prototype character of the manga which led to this series, and the Venus characterization is less ditzy and all over the place than Sailor Moon, sort of the kind of performance you get from someone who had been being a Sailor Senshi longer than anyone else. Karen Bernstein pretty much nailed Mercury from the beginning.

As for Sailor Moon herself, the biggest compliment I can give Terri Hawkes is that she began with the problem of continuing after Tracy Moore's original characterization and eventually made it her own as the episodes progressed. She's my favorite Sailor Moon actress because of that. All of the Tuxedo Mask actors are interchangeable to me though some were better at it than others. I never liked either of the "Rini" performances...my opinion was that they should have found an actual child actor. Finally, I think the one big casting mistake was Jill Frappier's Luna. I think Frappier is a great performer, but I wouldn't have chosen a "Angela Lansbury" type voice for Luna. It makes you think that she's very old, and yes I know that she was supposed to come off as the mature voice of reason in the series...very matronly. But the voice characterization comes off as someone around 60 years old, versus say Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins character (she was 28 during filming).

Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing some of all of major characters voiced by their original Vas (assuming age doesn't make that impractical). It's a level of comfort since those English language voices are what most of us have known for 15 years. I have no problem correcting the editorial decisions of the past (name changes, sex changes, editing for mature content, etc). But new actors or new actors who come completely with new characterizations across the board may take some getting used to. I'm sure that decision made for some spirited debate around Viz. We'll see what they decided soon enough.

Here's a bit of advice for you:

Go watch the ADV and Geneon DVD releases of the DiC and Cloverway show. THERE IS YOUR NOSTALGIA!

We honestly don't need these ridiculous essays by nostalgiasts who want to cry about how things "just won't be the same" if such and such doesn't happen to their favorite show. It's bullshit because what happened then is not the same as what is happening now. The new Sailor Moon release is designed to correct the mistakes of the past, not carry them over into the future. If you can't understand this, then bugger off.


Last edited by KabaKabaFruit on Sat May 24, 2014 4:10 pm; edited 1 time in total
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