Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon

美少女戦士セーラームーン
1992 -1997 Toei Animation TV Asahi 200 episodes Completed
Magical Girl Romance Action
Details & Synopsis
Usagi Tsukino began as a clumsy 14-year-old underachiever, but her journey across 200 episodes redefined the magical girl genre forever. This is the complete 1992 to 1997 original run, a massive five-season epic that travels from the urban supernatural grit of 90s Tokyo to the crystalline towers of the 30th Century and the absolute desolation of the Zero Star.

The full run preserves the total evolution of the Moon Princess: the early Dark Kingdom days, the alien Makaiju Tree detour, the apocalyptic arrival of the Black Moon, the mature Outer Guardian schism of the Death Busters, the surrealist Dead Moon Circus, and the cosmic-horror finale of Sailor Stars.

Forget the reboots and the modern remasters. This is the original archival grain. It is a legacy of Pure Hearts, Star Seeds, and a squad of planetary defenders that built the Western anime market alongside DBZ. From the DiC era nostalgia to the lost episodes of the final season, this is the absolute blueprint of love and justice. In the name of the moon, this is history.
Alt Title 美少女戦士セーラームーン
Studio Toei Animation
Network TV Asahi
Aired 1992 - 1997
Episodes 200
Genre Magical Girl, Romance, Action
Status Completed
← All lore

Fansub & Scanlation History

1992–1999: S-VHS Tape Trading & The VKLL Standard

Arctic Animation Was Already Subtitling Sailor Moon by 1995

LD Masters, TV-Timed Episodes & Mail-Order VHS

Arctic Animation belongs near the beginning of this history, not after VKLL. A fansubber directory updated in April 1995 listed Arctic Animation with Sailor Moon episodes 1–44 already completed or scheduled for completion, plus Sailor Moon R episodes 50–53 and 78–80. Some sets were sourced from Laserdisc while others were timed directly from Japanese television broadcasts. Later Sailor Moon FAQs noted that Arctic eventually released its old translation scripts publicly, letting part of that tape-era work survive after active distribution stopped.
[Arctic]

Random Masters Covered Episodes 59-66 and 71-74

Random Masters filled the Sailor Moon R gap in episodes 59-66 and 71-74, confirmed via a physical fansub VHS collector/trader documentation source, matching the gap-filling role already established from other sources on this page.
[Random Masters]

Anime Daisuki Covered Episodes 67-70

Anime Daisuki covered Sailor Moon R episodes 67-70, the remaining piece of the same gap, confirmed via the same physical VHS collector source.
[Anime Daisuki]

Glen A. Pearce Named as Chikashitsu's Distributor

A physical VHS collector source names Glen A. Pearce specifically as Studio Chikashitsu's individual distributor across their entire Sailor Moon run, episodes 1 through 58, real independent confirmation of coverage already established on this page from other sources.

VKLL Fansubs & The Uncut Laserdisc Trade

1992 TV Asahi Raws · S-VHS Mail-Order Distribution

When the 1995 DiC US television dub heavily edited Sailor Moon, fans who wanted the original Japanese series increasingly relied on the existing fansub tape network. VKLL became one of the most important names in that later VHS era, distributing Japanese-language material through Sailor Stars and helping keep large portions of the franchise available uncut before official North American releases caught up. VKLL operated through physical tape distribution rather than as a later digital release group. The group's own archived site also shows that it honored licensing season by season rather than treating Sailor Moon as one license all at once: a March 27, 2000 announcement stated that distribution of Sailor Moon S and SuperS would stop as of April 3, 2000.
[VKLL]

ADV Films Picks Up SM and SMR TV, October 2000

VKLL's own site update from October 19, 2000 references ADV Films acquiring the TV license for Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon R, a real, dated licensing event confirmed straight from a period fansub group's own site rather than a secondhand retrospective.
[VKLL]

VKLL's Sailor Stars Run Survived Into BitTorrent

Episodes 167–200 · Complete Final-Season Run

A later AnimeSuki snapshot preserves VKLL's entire Sailor Stars television run from episodes 167 through 200 as BitTorrent batches, finishing with 199–200 on April 10, 2004. The same page preserves both an older 167–170 release and a later resized version. VKLL therefore belongs to both sides of the transition: the VHS fansub culture that made the name famous and the early BitTorrent circulation that kept those subtitles moving years later.
[VKLL]

1993–2003: ASCII Scripts, Nakayoshi Scans & MixxZine

Usenet ASCII Scripts & Web Shrine Flatbed Scanning

Nakayoshi Imports · GeoCities Shrines & MixxZine Printing
Before web scanlations matured, fans read Naoko Takeuchi's manga through translated scripts circulating online alongside imported Nakayoshi magazines and Japanese tankōbon. By the late 1990s, fan translations and scanned manga pages were already part of Sailor Moon's English-language internet fandom while Mixx Entertainment began publishing the manga commercially in MixxZine. These were overlapping parts of the same rapidly expanding fandom, but the surviving record does not establish that fan scans themselves caused Mixx to launch its release.

Alex Glover's Sailor Moon Translations Come Down

Mixx Requests Their Removal

One of the clearest surviving examples of the old fan-to-commercial boundary comes from Alex Glover's manga translation site. A period Sailor Moon FAQ records that Glover had Sailor Moon translations online, but removed them at the request of Mixx after the manga entered commercial English publication. His Sailor V translations remained available. It is a small piece of the record, but an unusually concrete one: fan translations existed first, the licensed publisher objected, and the fan translator stepped back.

Miss Dream Became the Only Complete Source

While early web shrines scanned individual chapters in the 1990s, Miss Dream eventually became, by fan accounts, the only group to complete the entire Sailor Moon manga in English, and it's still running today as an archive of nearly all of Naoko Takeuchi's published work. Not without criticism though: fans comparing specific pages against the raw Japanese have documented real accuracy issues in the translation, a legitimate asterisk on an otherwise unmatched collection.
[Miss Dream]

1996–Present: Save Our Sailors & Commercial Licensing

The Great Pop-Tart Procott, December 14, 1996

Save Our Sailors (SOS) · Effectiveness Still Debated by Fans Who Were There

Save Our Sailors grew out of a Sailor Moon mailing list and became one of the earliest organized anime fan campaigns in the West. Its signature action, December 14, 1996, asked fans to buy Kellogg's unfrosted Strawberry Pop-Tarts specifically, a "procott" meant to demonstrate advertiser demand for more Sailor Moon. The remaining seventeen episodes of Sailor Moon R were eventually dubbed, and the series later returned to syndication with General Mills involved as a sponsor. Exactly how much credit belongs to the Pop-Tart campaign is much harder to establish. Even contemporary fandom debated whether the campaign had actually influenced those decisions, while Save Our Sailors itself claimed success. The uncertainty is part of the history now almost as much as the Pop-Tarts are.

The Fight Isn't Over, It Just Changed Targets

Sailor Moon Center's 2025 Rare-Media Preservation Drive

Crowdfunded · The Doomsday Duplicator

In August 2025, Sailor Moon Center launched a crowdfunded effort to digitally preserve rare Japan-only media before obsolete formats make it impossible. The first target is Sailor Moon S: Answer the Moon Call!, a 1994 quiz game made for the Japan-only Bandai Telebikko console, featuring original animation and the real anime cast, never released outside Japan and surviving only on aging tape. The actual bottleneck is specialist hardware, not motivation: proper transfer requires an open-source device called the Doomsday Duplicator, and doing it right costs real money. Success here could open the door to preserving other Japan-only tapes, including Hero Club releases.
[SM Center]

Viz Media Rescues the Original Anime, Sailor Stars Included

First-Ever North American Sailor Stars Release

Viz Media eventually acquired the original Sailor Moon anime and, for the first time in North America, officially released the Sailor Stars season alongside an uncut presentation of the rest of the series. Stars had been one of the largest holes left by the earlier English-language television era, and fansubs had been the practical way many English-speaking fans saw it for years. The official release finally closed a gap that the fan community had been filling since the VHS era.