Sailor Moon (season 1) VIZ dub

Sailor Moon was a big part of my childhood.  This anime was near and dear to my heart when I was a kid.  The version I watched on TV as a child was dubbed by DIC, later 4KidsTV.  It was very brutally edited for a young, American audience.  Subtitled, less edited versions were available on DVD, but I could not purchase them when I was younger.  I just had some dolls, a music CD, and my memories.

When the Sailor Moon franchise got a big revival in the mid 2010's, I was overjoyed.  I was an adult with income, and all the classic Sailor Moon manga and anime were re-released, with less edits, and more accurate dubs of the anime, and of course, plushies and other merch too.  I scooped up as much of it as I could, getting the VIZ release of the entire series on DVD, and the entire manga, re-released by Kodansha, and some plushies of the Sailor Guardians.

Watching Sailor Moon again was amazing for me, even as an adult.  It took a few episodes to adjust to the newer voice acting cast, because my brain still remembered their 90's voices very well, but I was able to get used to it easier than I expected.  The VIZ cast seems less cartoony than the DIC cast.  They sounded more serious, which fit the less edited version of the show.  The whole anime has a more serious tone than the version I remember as a kid.  The situations felt more dangerous.  The stakes were higher, people were in danger of actually dying.  Also, the subject matter of some of the episodes was more adult than I remembered.  I'm prolly gonna repeat these points when I review the manga.  This anime is way more directed at teenagers than the DIC edited dub was.  Overall, I'd say the differences that make it more true to the original make it even better than I remembered.

So far, this is my favorite Sailor Moon season to date.  I feel the Queen Beryl story arc has a magic that following seasons didn't quite capture for me. If you're not gonna watch all 5 seasons, season 1 is still a good story to enjoy on it's own.  I laughed, I cried, and I'll treasure this season forever.