Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 181 - Dragon Ball/Sailor Moon Games

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Ah, Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon: The twin jewels of '90s anime. Though many series have surpassed these two in longevity and popularity, these anime titans hold sole responsibility for getting so many Americans into anime during the late 90s, when Japanese animation wasn't so commonplace in our country. And, of course, when you have two properties so huge and influential, you're gonna see a whole bunch of video game adaptations. On this episode of Retronauts, GameSpot's Sam Leichtamer and Kallie Plagge join Bob and Jeremy to explore these anime mega-hits and the many games they spawned. Listen now, or in the name of the moon, we'll send you to another dimension!

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It's a fresh new take on one of the most popular comic book teams ever, and it's available only on DC Universe. You can watch it on all your favorite devices for only $7.99 a month. That's 20% off a yearly membership. So join the ultimate DC membership at DCUniverse.com and keep up with the Titans. This week on Retronauts we're recording live from the home for Infinite Losers. Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie. Today's episode is all about Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and maybe some of their games.

Before I continue, who is sitting across from me as normal? Hi, it's Jeremy Parrish, and as you can tell from my Dishwater blonde hair, I am a Dishwater Super Sion. Wow. So what level of SuperSayan are you? It's like 0.3. Point three. We'll all measure power levels throughout this recording. 9.3.

So we have two special guests, two new guests to Retronauts. They've never been on the show before. So at first, who is right over there? Callie Plagie. And who are you, Callie? I'm an editor at GameSpot, and I like anime a whole lot. And Callie is our Dragon Ball expert for this podcast. I'm putting that all on her, by the way.

That's a lot of responsibility. You didn't know what you're walking into. And who is right over here next to me? Magical Girl, Sam. And Sam, what is your full dossier? My full dossier is social media producer at GameSpot, and today I will be your Sailor Moon expert. And I apologize if I call your place of work GameStop. It's a problem I have, and my brain divides by zero whenever I have to say either one of those names.

I couldn't have Babbage's one, though, the retail wars. It wasn't, it didn't roll off the tongue. I think it was anti-Charles Babbage. Yeah, EB Games. Oh, wow, what a throwback. As long as Funkoland didn't win, I'm fine, because Funkoland is the stupidest name for a store. like took over all those companies. But nothing is called Funkoland anymore.

That's true. We haven't funko pops. So it's okay. We're getting off to a bad start here. So let's refresh. Let's refresh. So we are, we're branching out of Retronauts. We cover old games, of course, and we'll never run out of topics.

But Jeremy did something interesting recently, and he basically did it. For once in my life. For once, Jeremy stepped up to the plate. No, I'm kidding, Jeremy. You did a great episode about the Goonies. So you, I think you barely talked about the games. it was basically just about the movie, right? I did hear that episode.

It was, I would say, like, two-thirds about the movie and one-third about the games, because we've talked about the games a fair amount. It's true. I did something similar with Labyrinth, too, and that was more like a 50-50 split. Yeah, but I do like that approach, and I do feel like there's room to breathe for the retronauts format, and I think this is another experiment. So today we'll be talking about both. I would like to calm our anxious listeners and assure them that, no, we are not going to stop

talking about video games. We're not going to become an all-purpose media podcast. We are not going to mostly do episodes that are about movies or TV shows or whatever. Sometimes... Really about video games, but sometimes there are things that are tangential to video games that mean a lot to us that we want to talk about.

Like anime. Yes. Sometimes Daddy needs a break. That's right. Yeah, and by the way... We're very old and need maps. My life outside of Retronauts is hosting like two to three animation podcasts every week, so I can do plenty of that on the side. But I do wanted to, I did want to talk about this. I forget how we all collaborated, but I had lunch

with Sam and Callie and I think we figured out like this would be a good idea for a podcast topic. So I thank you for bringing your expertise to the table. But I feel like these are not just arbitrarily chosen, these two brands, if you want to call them that. They are both hugely influential, both in Japan and in America. Basically, these were the series that really kicked off anime fandom in the mainstream in America. I mean, it wasn't just, before that it was like people at college campuses, trading fan subs, and maybe the occasional you would rent like Ninja Scroll at Blockbuster. But this was when it hit the mainstream.

It was like accessible to the normal person. Well, and Dragon Ball Super Fighter Z or whatever, it's a Dragon Ball Fighters. You're hurting Cali inside right now. What's that? It's pronounced fighters, unfortunately. Fighters. Okay, just fighters. That is like the biggest fighting game right now.

It's huge. It is pretty much Smash Brothers level of popularity. Yes, it is huge. Dragon Ball is super relevant. Yeah. You kids who are playing as level 9,000 Brawley need to know about where Brawley came from in the first game place. It's true. It's true.

It's not longer in the curriculum. But, like, basically, Dragon Ball has been relevant since 1998. I think it hasn't stopped being relevant. Yeah, we're – I think we're hitting the 20th anniversary of – so in America, Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon have a lot in common. We'll be talking about Dragon Ball first, but to talk about both of them in this context is that they were both syndicated. So they aired in Japan for a long time, and people bought the rights to them and syndicated them, and they did not do a very good job, ratings-wise. Cartoon Network bought those syndication packages in the late 90s, and that is where they really took off. That is where, for whatever reason, that packaging that airing them on the tsunami block in America, that is what made all of these things take off.

And Sailor Moon and Dragon Balls, you have the exact same story in terms of taking off in America, for sure. That 1998 Tsunami lineup. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that was the real deal. 98 was like critical mass for mainstream anime on television because of the Tsunami block. I mean, previously Tsunami, in case you don't know what it was, it was a cartoon network block for action cartoons. And before Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and anime, real anime hit it, it was basically like Thunder cats and things like that.

It was sort of like Japan animated but American produced cartoons. But it wasn't until Dragon Ball where this became like. like a phenomenon, I think. So it wasn't Dragon Ball localized, you know, the anime in some form before it showed up on Tsunami? Because I remember I was living in a really just unspeakably shitty apartment in 1997 in the first half of 98. And I remember watching a few Dragon Ball videotapes, like officially released videotapes that I rented while I was living in that apartment. So that would have been like before, say, May 1998. Yes.

Kelly. Yeah. So it's interesting. So, I mean, most people are familiar with Dragon Ball Z, but the Dragon Ball manga manga in all its volumes is broken up basically into Dragon Ball and then Dragon Ball Z. So the original Dragon Ball, like, early manga chapter adaptation, I think, aired in, like, 95. 95, yeah. And it was canceled due to really low popularity.

And it wasn't until, like, because Dragon Ball Z is more typically Shonen and is more focused on, like, actual, like, martial arts. Whereas Dragon Ball is the more comedy focus. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that, that Dragon Ball anime adaptation. was that good. I remember being very excited to rent it because I'd heard so much about it and watched

like the first three tapes and just totally bounced off of it. I think, but I love the manga. The manga is so good. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I just could not recommend the manga highly. The manga is great. I think the manga is so fantastic.

I have to say, Jeremy, they changed a lot for that version of Dragon Ball. So I went back recently and I watched a lot of original Dragon Ball, the first series. And it's really good. The adaptation is really good. But when I was watching it, I was like, why did they ever think they could put this on American TV? There's like, in every episode, there's some, a Bulma accidentally flashes somebody. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like episode four.

Yeah, yeah. She ends up flashing Master Roche very early on because Goku doesn't understand genitalia. That's right. Oh, my God. And this is going to be fun for Sam who knows nothing about Dragon Ball. But, like, yeah, I want Sam to ask questions about all this stuff. In the early stories, Goku's just a little kid who's grown up, like, in the wilderness. He's a feral child, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the general. It's not like adult, adult Goku, like, how do genitals? Yes. Speaking of genitals, you see Goku's genitals a lot in this, I mean, it is just like a curly line or whatever, but it's not played to be like. Wrong descriptive truth. Well, whatever. It's like, it's like a three hanging off of his body, but I, it's not put there to, like, entice anyone. It's just like, this is a little boy, who cares, you know.

I mean, nudity is also. has a different connotation in Japan in a lot of ways. So, but, like, it was very, very heavily censored when it was first localized, which I think diminishes the comedic quality of it in a lot of ways. It's, it's very bawdy. Like, I don't think it's especially pervy or anything like that, but, like, there's a lot of, so, like, if you read Dr. Slump, you can see why Dragon Ball is the way it is in the beginning because there's so much toilet humor.

In fact, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Oolong, the pig character, who's a, who's a dick. In order to get Oolong to cooperate, they basically give him. a drug that will allow anyone to give him diarrhea on command by saying a certain word. I think it's whistling in the manga? I don't remember. I think they go BBB or something like in anime. Yeah, some like Anamonopoeia. But they do that to him multiple times.

So it's like they're torturing a pig with like forced diarrhea. It's weird. Yeah. And I think worth mentioning that Dr. Slump was Akira Toriamma's previous manga. And there's actually a lot of Dr. Slump references in early Dragon Ball. There is. And they just, I think the 900th, 900th nenderoid they're making is a character from Dr. Slump. Yeah, Arleigh, the main character.

Yeah. I just, someone tweeted that at me because I love Dr. Slump. That's all available in English. It was translated like in the mid-aughts by, I think Alexander O. Smith did the translation for that. Apparently so. I brought that up in my interview with him about his attorney. But let's get into Dragon Ball. We've already gotten into it.

But I want to know, how did we encounter it? I mean, I had a similar thing with that Jeremy had where I, I remember I had like the flu or something really bad, and it was on maybe like 6 a.m. on Saturday, and this was the original syndicated Dragon Ball, and I vaguely knew what anime was about. I was like, oh, this is so cool. I never saw it again, but I had this kind of vague awareness of it until it came on to Tsunami, and I think that is when, for everybody, for most people, that is where you were, like, really getting into it at that point. Callie, how about you? Yeah, I'm two older, like, weiboo cousins, and they were the ones who introduced me to all the, shonen and stuff. So I'd go over

to like my grandma's house and they'd be watching it on Tsunami. But I was very young. I am a baby. So when it was first airing, I was I was pretty young and I think my mom was a little hesitant because it's it seems very violent even though it's like

I don't know, it's silly and there are lighthearted aspects of Dragon Ball. So I got like actually into it and actually into the story a lot later. Just kind of revisiting the manga as an adult. For me, It was the thing I didn't want to watch on 2-90 years old. That's fair. It's fair.

That was my first experience, and then thereafter, watching it casually with friends, I think. I've seen a few episodes here and there, but never really piqued my interest. So let's get into the history of Dragon Ball. It's created by Akira Toriyama, born in 1955. He has got a big thumbprint on video games, whatever you want to call that. He, of course, we just did an episode about Chrono Trigger. He contributed a lot to the visual style of that game. He is basically what put Dragon Quest on the map because of collusion between Shonen Jump and Enix.

This is all true. That's right, Jeremy. He was basically writing advertorial. for Dragon Quest in Shonen Jump because he was friends with Yuji Hori. Right. I don't remember exactly how they got to know each other, but basically when Hori and Chunsoff started developing Dragon Quest, there was the connection with Shonan Jump, which had a connection with Enix, the publisher. Right. And they were like, you should do artwork for this series. And even that alone wasn't enough to make the Dragon Ball or Dragon Quest extremely popular at first. it was when they started really pushing it in Shonen Jump

and really highlighting the Toriyama connection kind of at the peak of Dr. Slump's popularity that people were like, oh, I should go buy this game. That is nothing like Dr. Slump, but it became popular anyway. Yeah, Dr. Slump, we should mention. We brought it up earlier on the show, but it's nothing at all like what you imagine Dragon Ball Z is. Like, Dr. Slump, it's great.

It is sort of like the Japanese version of Mad Magazine but about like a central cast of characters. It is like, Toriyama admits, like, I write the stories as I draw them. There's no plan. And a lot of Dr. Slump is very autobiographical. Like, if you read Dr. Slump, like, the in-between chapter stuff is Toriyama making fun of himself. He talks about how he lives with his parents, about how he's always late. Like, he has to literally take drawings to the airport to mail them to his, like, to Shonen Jump or whatever.

And if you think, if you make fun of Toriyama for, like, oh, he can only draw so many characters. He actually does that in the manga itself. At one point in the manga, one character has to disguise herself as another one, but they look nothing alike in terms of body shape and size. And the character goes, that's okay, the artist can only draw one face. So even he knows, even he knows, like, yeah, I'm good at some things. Maybe not faces. Maybe I can only draw, like, one face for every woman.

No, you know, Dragon Quest 9, you can build your own characters. There's at least five different faces available. I think somebody helped him with that. But, yeah, I recommend, like, picking up a few volumes. It's super silly. It's like, it is for kids in a way, but it's also like very mad magazine style stuff. Like there are parodies of like contemporary movies like Star Wars and they just, he just, it's just a playground for like being silly and being fun.

There's like a little talking happy poop also. That's my favorite Dr. Slump character, not having actually read it. Like everything in Dr. Slump is anthropomorphic. Like the sun, poop, everything. So that's Dr. Slump. But Dragon Ball, of course, is the follow up to Dr. Slump. published over the course of 10 years 42 Tonkoban volumes

Those are like the little I can't even This is not a modern reference I'm going to say like TV guide size But TV guide doesn't exist anymore That's not Oh boy I'm losing the kids

Paperback There's Tonka Bon and then there's Wide Bon Yeah Wide Bon is like a game of throw Sorry a song of ice and fire volume Yes Tonkabon is like a third of that Tonkabon is how you like buy all of your manga

Like for the most part Yeah if you like go to us Like even like a Barnes & Noble That's most of the manga you'll see Right Yeah. So you might have seen this earlier. So Dragon Ball was syndicated. 13 episodes were syndicated. It didn't do very well. The same thing happened in Dragon Ball Z. They syndicated 53 episodes. That didn't do well between 96 and 98. And then Tunami. Cartoon Network was pretty famous for scooping up like a band and series. That's basically like half of the beginning of adult swim was just like, we'll buy your cancel. It's a common air it. So that was no different than what they did with Tunami. And that's really where it picked up. No one was really talking. about it in the syndication years, but after it got widespread, you know, release at the same time, at the same channel, every day of the week, it really exploded in huge ways. The problem was, just like the original Dragon Ball dub, it was censored in often hilarious ways and often in unnecessary ways.

So we mentioned the Home for Infinite Losers. It's weird that they took a filler episode. That was a filler episode of the series. It was not based on anything from the manga, but they were like, we're going to put the most. work into digitally repainting this needless episode. And so instead of having two demons wearing shirts that say, hell, in every

scene they're in, they say H-F-I-L. And that was their change. So I think they were like, we'll do whatever we want with your show. We have magic tools to do this. But I think for a lot of us, this was eye-opening, because Dragon Ball in Japan, the series ended in 1996. And in 1998 is

when it took off in America. So there were literally like 10 years of existing Dragon Ball content, and we were just getting it in the late 90s, which is crazy. And it's funny. So I did like a history of Dragon Ball games thing, and it was specifically targeted at North America. And there were a lot of comments about how France is way cooler than North America.

They got, yeah. They got Dragon Ball way sooner. And I just want to shout out the Big Green dub where Piccolo is called Big Green. Big Green. Because it was translated. It was a translation in English of a French translation of the Japanese. Wow. So it was like this weird telephone game.

and it's, I would recommend watching clips of it. Wait, wait, wait, roll that back. I need to, I need to, like, my brain needs to do math again. So it was a French translation of an English translation. No, it was an English translation of the Japanese. And it's called the big green dub. Right, but the Japanese character's name is taken from the English word pickle. So it's like, it's, yeah, it's too.

Wait, not the instrument? I thought it was supposed to, like, all the characters named for, like, fruits and vegetables, right? Piccolo in Dragon Ball. Radits and Kakorot. Radits, yeah. I think Piccolo in the original Dragon Ball, he was with a group of those green folks, and they were all named out for different instruments. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. Where were we? Yeah, cool, but yeah. This really opened up people's eyes. I think knowing, it's sort of like when you were in the 90s, at least when I was in the 90s and thinking like, oh, this is actually the sixth Final Fantasy game. They're hiding Final Fantasy from us, so it sparked the sort of outrage where, like, I have to find all this stuff. So I think that is what really made me.

people go out and find more, especially because, as I said before, they only localize 53 episodes and where it cuts off, if you remember back in the day, it cuts off in like towards the end of a very important arc in the series, like as Goku is fighting Friza, to end on a cliffhanger and then start episode one again, it was like the biggest bummer. And that happened over and over until they finally localized more, maybe like two years later. So people were just starved for Dragon Ball. I feel like that's like, sorry, I was just going to say, I feel like that's a perpetual anime struggle, though, like, as a fan, like, there's so many times, like, series will get localized for one season or half a season, and then you're just stuck with these

cliffhangers, and you're like, man, I guess I'll read the manga now. At least Dragon Ball made it all the way to completion, whereas a lot of my favorite vintage manga, like Galgo 13 or Urucei Yatsura, have never been completely localized into English. Maybe the anime for Urucei Yatsura has, but, like, the manga just dropped off and they've never revisited it, even at the point where they were just like, we will take. take any comic from Japan and stick it on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. That never came back. That's true.

They never finished your answer to the manga. Wow. That's crazy. So to trace, so Dragon Ball is famously a fighting, a shonen fighting, anime and manga. But as we talked about, it was more of like a comedic adventure story with like very low stakes. And like he was willing to end the plot line on a joke. Like the entire, the entire end of the first arc ends with them getting a wish and the pig wishes for panties and it's all over. Like that is what he led up to for like a 13 episode arc.

So he was willing to undercut all of all of the stakes just for a joke. But that all changed actually when so the second arc of the original Dragon Ball is a fighting tournament. And it was- It is the original manga fighting tournament. Yeah. I mean, there has to be some precedent. Oh, I'm sure. But like this is the one that changed history.

It really did. Every anime and manga has to have a fighting tournament after this point. Yeah, I mean, this is. what basically made the blueprint for a shonen manga in that, so the second arc of Dragon Ball, the manga, is a fighting tournament. And the thing is, it is a Toriyama work from this period. So it is a parody of kung fu movies. And of course, like, Master Roshi is disguised as Jackie Chun and Goku has to fight Jackie Chun. And

there's a guy named like Bacterion and his power is he smells really bad so no one can fight him. Like, it is all played for comedy. But this is where the series really took off in Japan. People like seeing these fights. Toriyama was very good at coming up with creative encounters. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing is there was a lot of creativity in this fighting arc. So it wasn't just like tough dudes being tough. It was funny and witty and always surprising. You never really knew where the story was going to go. Right. Just like different techniques from different fighters and seeing how that feels is really fun. And how like the how the arena would change things and stuff like that. That'd be more of a Z thing, like how fighting in different places

would change the fights. But yeah, This is really what started every Shonen manga from here on out. I mean, from this point on, Dragon Ball, for the most part, there'd be some more comedy, but eventually would move towards these arcs against, like, we're going to fight this one enemy at the end of the arc, who's very strong, and we're going to have to figure out a way to defeat him. But in the meantime, we will fight these henchmen, and it will all be very creative and interesting. It still stays pretty comedic throughout, but after this fighting tournament, it really takes a turn, I think. Yeah, and there's also the whole plot element. of Goku being, like, a creature from another planet, he turns into a gigantic, indestructible ape

when the full moon shines. Yeah. And that kind of, I think that gets pretty much lost later on, but it's something to do with his tail. Yeah, like all sayans can turn into a great ape. But like, in, I think it's that arc or maybe the arc after it, I can't remember now, but Master Roshi destroys the moon just to avoid that being a problem.

Like, he just, like, trashes the whole, like, point of intrigue. He does the Kamehameha into the moon at the end of that fighting arc because it ends with Goku transforming. I'm pretty sure it's that one. Yeah. But he blows up the moon. I think it's that one, yeah. But that also reminds me of just how goofy this whole thing is the ultimate, like, martial arts technique is named for the King of Hawaii, you know, like the 17th century or whatever.

But, yeah, I mean, he was willing to make big changes to this series just based on whims. I think it's the beginning of Dragon Ball Z, the Dragon Ball Z period, like the time skip period where in the first episode you're like, oh, you thought. Goku was like a monkey guy. He's actually an alien, and he's from this alien race, and people from this race are going to come down and fight him. Like, that was never an element in the show before, but that's just something's like, oh, this will be a way to introduce a series of enemies for him to fight and continue this sort of pattern that people really love. And I think, unfortunately, this was really burning out Toriyama making these fights. And he was, he's a born comedy writer who was sort of kind of like haplessly thrown into this role as a guy who has to write fighting manga for the most. part.

Yeah, I don't think Dragon Ball Z was like a formal breakout from Dragon Ball. It was always just Dragon Ball, right? Yeah, Z was there is like this huge tonal change where there's like a time jump and all a sudden things get really serious. And there's like, you know, science who come to Earth and want to trash everything. And all of a sudden it goes from being this kind of like lighthearted, can Goku prove himself and get the Dragon Balls to like, oh shit, everyone's going to die. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was like always just called Dragon Ball in Japan. I think the Dragon Ball Z, like division comes from the local. I think it is in the anime is like the anime is like basically like season or series two yeah yeah yeah but like the manga was always just dragon ball yeah uh so i think the problem with dragon ball is in terms of its reception is like it is fun to hate things that are popular i i know that from experience it's great just try it but i think the bad rap the series gets uh and i think

rightfully so is the anime is very poorly paced in case in case you don't watch anime and i don't know why you're listening to stuff still if you don't watch anime but uh in many cases like in anime adaptations are running you either concurrently or maybe a little behind the manga so when the manga uh you know is still like trying to produce new content the anime will either have to make filler or drag things out and i mean you get to the point where when goku fights an enemy it's like oh this planet will explode in five minutes and that's like three or four episodes so they they do like comic style time distillation that doesn't work quite as well with the animation format.

Yeah, and the manga is so well-paced, too. Yeah. The anime really suffered from that, like, oh, and it sucks because, like, that, it came so late in America. I mean, it was first published in, like, 85. Yeah, 85 to 95. It was just like, we were getting this huge delay where, like, the manga was already finished, but the anime had been made kind of more alongside it and was trying to keep up,

or trying to, the manga had to keep up with the anime in Shonen Jump, and it's just, yeah. That's where you get, like, the Dragon Ball Z fights. last three or four episodes. Yeah, there's lots of, like, I'm training now, and I'm going to grunt a lot. Yeah, we're going to scream for 10 minutes, and then it's like next week on Dragon Ball Z. That's a pretty common problem with manga to anime adaptations, and different works solve it in different ways, like Nausica and Akira, basically you're just like, well, the story ends halfway through, we're done, thanks everyone, credits roll, but they couldn't really do that with an ongoing

TV series, but you also saw that with stuff like Romo One Half, where it's just like, you love Ronma too? Well, Romma's great for like the first two seasons where it's very close to the manga and then you start getting all these filler episodes in between the actual Takahashi story arcs and you're like wow, this was a filler because that was some garbage. Yeah,

and there's like so much filler in Dragon Wall Zeevers like, oh there's like a pinball episode that's like really early on. Some are pretty fun like. Rurone attention goes to the circus. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some are fun. I like I like the driving lesson episode. They cut all the filler out. So there is an ideal

way to watch this. And if you listen to the really great podcast, AllSystems Goku, it is Jeff Gertzman and Dan Reichert who did not like anime, but watching Dragon Ball Z for the first time and really getting into it. They're watching the remade version. It's sort of a refurbished version called Dragon Ball Z. Kai,

which is essentially like let's, now that we don't have to keep up with the manga or, you know, stay concurrent with the manga, let's make the ideal version of this so they edit a lot of stuff out. It's all like updated the original animation cells and stuff like that. It's kind of like Mac Ross do you remember Love or something like that?

Where it's just like, suck it down and make it essential. Although worth noting that you do have to buy it, it's not available for streaming. It's a bummer, yeah. So you, to watch it legally, you do have to buy it. I think you can buy it on Amazon in the States, but it's the only Dragon Ball thing that's not readily available on streaming, which sucks. Yeah, I mean, that is the ideal. I don't know if you could really, in this day and age, like, kind of suffer through

the pacing of those, of the original work. But I will say, like, one piece is something I love, and it's really, like, directly, directly inspired by Dragon Ball. And I think in some ways I surpassed it in terms of longevity and popularity. But with that anime, I think they were savvy enough to be like, this is going to be badly paced,

but we need to end every episode on some sort of cliffhanger. And I think they do a good job of that that they weren't quite as savvy about with Dragon Ball Z. They're just like, oh, this is where the episode ends. You'll see the rest next time, I guess.

Speaking of like this version of Dragon Ball Kai, makes me think of the major reason why I have a hard time watching or connecting with Shonen in anime in general is because of all the filler, all like the filler fights and all that.

And I would, I mean, I would love a condensed version of, like, bleach, for instance, which has, you know, hundreds and hundreds of episodes. Yeah. Filler episodes. One piece is such a fun watch, though. Like, what are we at in episode 900 or something? It's up there. It's like, it's on your, it'll hit your 20 of the anime next year.

It's already on year 20 of the manga. And it's basically just one guy. Like, and he started it when he was 22 or something crazy like that. Like, he's like a prodigy, like a manga prodigy. But it is still, like, the most popular thing. Japan. Yeah, like, that's the best example, I think, of, like, one that is easy to stick through. I also want to shout out the four kids opening because it's absolute garbage and I love it.

It's, like, this horrible rap. Oh, I was thinking of the Rock the Dragon. Oh, dude, Rock the Dragon is so bad, but I love it. Some intense shredding throughout that 30-second song. Yeah, no, the one-piece opening rap is, like, so good. I think I quoted that to a friend, Yo-ho-ho, he took a bite of gum gum. Yeah. Yep, that's what that was on TV.

Yeah, that's my favorite part. For sure. But I feel like what is interesting about Dragon Ball is that, like, Toriyama is a huge nerd, if that wasn't obvious. Like, he's a huge, like, like, he loves nerdy stuff, especially if you read Dr. Slump, read those autobiographical things. And one of the, in the beginning of every manga book, usually there's, like, a picture of the, author usually drawn by the author himself or someone else, giving, like, here's what's happening in my life right now. And I read someone posted one on Twitter that was like, from an early Dragon Ball volume. And Toriyama goes, oh, my son was born. I can finally go back into

toy stores again. I'm so excited. So that was his reaction to having a child. Like, I can, I can go into a toy store without shame. It's like, no, my child is here with me. Doesn't he always draw himself wearing one of those breathing masks? Yeah. He's got like little claw hand robot. He's like a claw hand robot guy with like a gas mask on. He used to draw himself as a bird, though, because his name's Toriyama, Bird, Bird Mountain. So yes, Toriyama is a big nerd and has a huge influence on gaming, but I feel like

these tournaments, the way Dragon Balls paced with the fighting, I feel like it is both inspired by games and also did inspire games in terms of just how these arcs would always work. And I feel like even if the designers in Japan didn't realize

that, I think Dragon Ball had a lot of influence on just the way games are paced and the way enemy encounters work and stuff like that. Am I crazy about this? This is just something I feel like is just a very implicit thing in game design in a certain era of time.

Yeah, I mean, you have, like, in games you have, you know, to lead up to a big boss fight, you fight through some henchmen or, you know, some lesser bosses, and that's kind of how Dragon Ball is structured, or Dragon Ball Z especially, is structured. I do think, like, tracing the history of Dragon Ball games is interesting because you see the shift

between, like, a Dragon Ball, like, early, like, Kid Goku-era game versus, like, Dragon Ball Z-inspired game. and I think it's really interesting. I always think of Dragon Ball and fighting manga and anime when, especially in RPGs where they put you in a fight you can't win and then you have to die and it is sort of like Goku dies a thousand times in the series. Like character death is just sort of like they go out and like take a time out basically.

So I feel like stuff like that really reminds me of fighting anime and Dragon Ballsie especially. Yeah. And you know, one of the things that makes Goku such an admirable character is that even death won't stop him. Like he dies and he goes and trains with God. Yeah. When I come back to life, I'm going to be even stronger because I'm training with God. Death is no impediment in the Dragon Ball world.

And it was called Another Dimension. Again, there were a lot of funny localization changes. I remember reading a page feverishly in the 90s. I think it was called Dragon Ball Z-en censored. And it was like fastidiously listing every change in the entire series. And some were so ridiculous. I remember like some enemy shows up, probably Vegeta is like blowing planes out of the sky. And they add like lines like, oh, they're fine.

They're parachutes open. things like that, where it's just like, come on, I, we've seen more violent things on TV. But before we get to the games, just to kind of reiterate this, like I feel like Dragon Ball Z was this gateway drug for Americans getting into anime, along with Pokemon, which launched that same fall in both anime and video game form, it was sort of like this is how different and cool Japanese cartoons can be. Like, they can tell these long stories, characters can die, even though we don't say they die. You know they're dead. I feel like this sort of opened a lot of people's eyes, people much younger than me, too, like, oh, this is what a cartoon can do. And I think it really changed what American cartoons could do after that, too. You forgot to mention Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon. Oh, what about it? Well, you said Dragon Ball and Pokemon. Oh, Sailor Moon is true, yes. But that predates those. That was already here. Yeah. It was already making ripples and spreading waves.

It was. We will get to Sailor Moon, but it was also very important. We're kind of doing this backward, I guess. In terms of Dragon Ball, yes, both Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon, but yes, they did, they each, like, showed Americans, like, here is what a series can be. It does not have to be a thing with a moral at the end or something that will teach you something. It could be, like, a cool battle that takes place over multiple episodes. And that's what I feel like there were rules against, like, you cannot have, you cannot have lingering storylines. Because if we want to syndicate these shows, we want to show them in whatever order we want.

So that was, like, a huge no-no for American programming. but this sort of broke people of that idea. Yeah, and I really love animation. I love all sorts of animation. I grew up watching like American-made comedy animation, like The Simpsons and eventually like a few drama and King of the Hill and stuff like that. I do think something that was so eye-opening about anime for me

was I was very used to American cartoons being either explicitly for children or adult comedy. And with anime and manga, it was like, oh, here's this whole other spectrum of storytelling that we don't really get in America. And obviously, like, Dragon Ball in general is very silly, and there is this, like, kid-like element to it. But that's the first thing I saw that was not like anything else had ever seen. Well, it's interesting with Sailor Moon, especially because I think the Target audience in Japan for that anime and manga was a lot higher in age. And you can see in like the first localization attempts that they really tried to make it for children. Yeah.

When it was actually really for like teen girls in in Japan. So it's interesting to see like the cultural differences and like how we view animation in general and storytelling and animation. Yeah, you're right. Like they really wanted to like the audience age was a bit higher for these shows than the local writers wanted it to be. So they did do a lot of trying to tone them down. Ultimately, like a, it was much harder to do with a violent show like Dragon Ball than it would be with something like Sailor Moon, where a lot of the adult things that were happening weren't visual per se. And they tried to cover a lot of them up with like, oh, no, that's a boy. Like Sailor June and Uranus?

Oh, Kiss and Cousins. Yeah, there's actually quite a lot in there, yeah. There is a lot. Even when you're watching the first de-localization now, if you go back and look at it, you can see how they were bending. over backwards to try to make it for children, especially if you go back and you watch the original. Oh, God, yes. It's quite cringy in some places.

Yeah, I feel like, again, approaching this series as an American localizer with the American morals of the mid-90s, I'm like, why did you even attempt this? Yeah, why do you bother? Yeah, there's so much that was edited. I mean, like, there's lots of jokes on the end of internet about four kids localization to

or like guns, guns become fingers. Oh, it's a similar thing, yeah. It's right there in the name four kids. The One Piece one was, it was Dragon Ball Z level ridiculousness. Like characters, like the Marines are the bad guys in the sense in One Piece, but they had to, like, erase the word Marine from their hats or something like that because it was, I guess, considered anti-American. I don't know. There were a lot of weird, weird changes in the One Piece stuff. But we'll talk about One Piece another day.

That's my personal project. Let's talk about the Dragon Ball Z games. This is a gaming podcast sometimes. And Dragon Power is something, Jeremy. Have you made a video about this? I haven't. I'll get to it before too long. Yeah, but it is probably, oh, 1988.

Wow, okay. I thought it was 87 in the U.S. I thought it was, it's one of the earlier third-party games, though, right? Yeah, it's pretty early in the NES, yeah. But this is, this came over as, this was a Dragon Ball game released in Japan for the Famicom. But it was just called Dragon Power in America because we didn't know anything about Dragon Ball and we wouldn't have had any way of knowing. But they made a lot of odd changes where it just like, you didn't know.

need to change the Goku Sprite. Nobody knew what a Goku was. Right. They just changed a lot of names. So like, Bulma is Nora, Yomcha's Lancer. Ulong is, he's my favorite. He's pudgy and he's referred to as a child instead of a pig. So I made changes like that to just kind of like make it more generic, basically. And all of the like Dragon Ball music and stuff was stripped out of the game. Wow. Maybe they had to pay for some of that. I'm sure. Yeah. It's, you know, it's all part of the

license and they didn't want to pay any part of the license. Well, it would have been worth it. Like, there would have been no point. So I haven't covered this game specifically, but it is one of the mini Tose Bandai collaborations that showed up on the Famicom and came to the U.S. With the manga license stripped, you also had, well, Mussel was the one thing that didn't have the license strip because that was actually a toy line in the U.S., but you had Gegeegege No Kitaro, which came over as Ninja Kid.

you had crap, the chubby cherub game that was Obake no Qatoro. Was that a ghost? Yes, it was a ghost. With like a duck mouth. Yeah, but he was turned into

a cherub, an angel. But, like, you could still see, oh, yeah, that's a Fuji, the Doraemon guy, the team. Like, you could still tell him his art in the characters,

but they edited it enough that it was different. That's a Doraeum person made a Kutaro? Okay, I didn't know that. The team made Kutaro before Doraemon. So anyway, yeah, Dragon Power was another one of these where Bondi basically specialized in, you know, licensing anime and turning them into bad video games developed by Tosei usually.

I can see. And they would bring that over to the U.S., but strip away the license and very, like, just change up the pixels and the music and stuff. I think I can see the, like, Bandai Games had the same box art template where it was like, there's a piece of clip art, and then there's like two tiny TV screens behind the clip art. Is that Dragon Power as well? I can kind of see it in my mind.

A guy, like a badly rendered dude and a ghee. Yes, like a generic kung fu guy. A flying kick, yeah. Yeah. Though in France, like I said earlier, they did have Dragon Ball there by the time Dragon Power came out. So it was, it retained its license aspects in France. and it was actually just called Dragon Ball. So Dragon Power was, it was localized in France.

Yeah, it was localized with the Dragon Ball license in France. Interesting. France was like way ahead of the curve with Dragon Ball. And I think all anime in general, I don't know why France. Like it seems like a lot of countries, European countries, were like ahead of the game. Italy, too. Italy, yeah. I know a lot of people in foreign countries that were like, oh, no, we got Dragon Ball way before you guys.

And we got all this stuff before you guys did. Yeah, I got a comment on a feature that was somebody was like, How dare you, France is the gateway of manga or something like that? I mean, it makes sense because you have, you know, the tradition of Bonn Desiné and guys like Jean-Girard Mobius who created comics that had a very manga-like sensibility and were very geared toward adults. So it makes sense to me that manga would find traction over there a lot more quickly than it would hear. Yeah. We're still seeing articles that are biff, pow, comics aren't just for kids. Yes.

I actually, I think we can trace this back to even today the whole comics code movement and the freak out in the 40s and 50s about comics and how it sort of shut down an entire medium. If Frederick Wortham saw Sailor Yerness and Siler Neptune Kissin or Bulma flashing her no panties and Master Roshi, he would have died right there. I want to bring him back to life and make them watch all of Dragon Ball. I mean, that's an important thing I guess to mention. I think I brought it up on my censorship episode. But, yeah, like, basically, for our entire country, a medium was, like, crushed, and it was just made, like, four children until, like, the comics with an ex-movement of the 70s and people picking up after that.

But still, you are not considered a cool dude if you're out reading a comic book and an adult in public for the most part. Absolutely. But, yeah, this game is bad, in case you were wondering. And, again, like, this has all been online for years, but I just love the changes to this game we talked about. It's a sandwich game. and I believe this game covers the first arc of Dragon Ball in which they get all the Dragon Balls and Ulaan gets them first and he wishes for panties. But in this game, it's redrawn to be a sandwich. And I think they do something with Master Roshi.

It's half a sandwich. It's a triangle. Yeah. So they barely change the panties plate. It's true. It was not a very good panty sprit to begin with if I can make that judgment. Yeah, they had to change like all the panties references. Yeah.

But you're like, why does that old guy so excited about lunch? Yeah. He's hungry. Look how skinny he is. But not the character lunch. Yeah, not like, oh, he was excited for her too. Yeah, she's great. Love her.

She's one of my favorite characters in Dragon Ball. But yeah, it has like, I think just kind of something to point out is that a lot of Dragon Ball games were used to now. We mentioned fighters are fighting games. And this one is more of like an adventure game in the style of maybe like the original legend of Zelda where there's like a scrolling. That's very generous. Yeah. No, I mean, like not nearly as good or well executed, but the same kind of top down going from one screen to the next. and exploring, and then there's, like, side-scrolling battles.

But it's just very different because it is sort of more of the adventure side of Dragon Ball that you're seeing. It is, yeah. But after this, I mean, so there be a lot of Famicom Dragon Ball games, and a lot of them would be, like, these weird RPGs that had, like, a card-based or dice-based battle system. Like, I played a lot of these back in when I was just messing around with tons of, you know, Japanese games. But eventually, it makes perfect sense that Dragon Ball would just become fighting games. I mean, the rise of Dragon Ball, like, the transition from Dragon Ball into a fighting series also correlated or was alongside the rise of the fighting game in popularity. I will say that when people, you know, when developers do try to tackle the original Dragon Ball saga before Z, they do tend to go toward more of an adventure style.

I don't know that I've seen, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't know that there's been a game just based on the Bhutan, like the original tournament. I don't know. But there was Dragon Ball Origins. Yeah, I was thinking of that. developed, I think, by, it wasn't Nintendo Software Technologies, but it was like people who went to Digipen, I think. And it was very much, it was very well regarded, actually. Yeah, for good things about it.

On the saga. And it wasn't quite an RPG, but it was in that kind of adventure mold. That's a 3DS game? No, original DS. Okay, there's a good advanced game, too, just called, like, Dragon Ball Advanced Adventures or something like that. Advanced Adventure, yeah. Oh, that's it, okay, yeah.

It's like, I think Tosey made it as well. It's just colorful, and it's just a really simple, like, platformer slash prollers. Yeah, and then there's, I mean, there's one that's not so good, but it's a legacy of Goku is also based on the early manga. There's not actually, there's so many Dragon Ball games. There's over 40 that were localized just in North America. Yeah.

Wow. Since, you know, 1980, 78, and that's mostly, you know, all the 80s games other than Dragon Power were Japan only and most of the 90s games as well. So it's a lot of games in the past 20 years. for the most part and most of them are about no adult Goku so there's very few

but yeah Advanced Adventure is one of those and origins and there was a Wii game I think as well You mentioned Legacy of Goku I remember when I was working at a game stop

There we go I did it right When I was working at GameStop In 2001 I remember it was the first time there was a new Dragon Ball game for Gameboy Advance And it wasn't very good And it was very short

Do we know what that's called? I totally forget There's several. So there's like Boo's Fury as part of the legacy of Goku series. And then there's like Toketsu, I think, or something like that, which is also a Game Boy Advance game. There's also like a card game that was made for Game Boy Advance. So it's just Dragon Ball Cards. I did a whole feature on these where I listed every single one.

So I should know this. Can you start? It's okay for things to blend together. Yeah, I mean, there are 40 Dragon Ball games. There's way too many. There's way too damn many. We're going to be able to be. Oh, I think it is like a legacy of Goku.

Oh, the one you were thinking of? Yeah, because I remember it was bad, but the last draft. Dragon Ball game to come out in America was Dragon Ball G.T. Final Bout, which, again, I worked at GameStop, did it right. And that game, because it was produced in such small quantities, because it was produced before and released before the tsunami boom happened. Nobody had it. And if you, if someone traded that in, there was like a silent alarm you pushed to alert your manager. Like, we just hit pay dirt because I think we paid $120 for that game. And that's back when, I mean, it's always been the case, but you get no money for trading in your games. 20 bucks would be a big deal. You got over 100 for trading in Dragon Ball GT Final Bout, a terrible, a bad, bad game. But, Callie, can you talk about some of these fighting games? I mean, they all sort of run together because they are all kind of doing the same thing. It's sort of like, how many characters can we put in at once? Right. So the ones I selected for the show specifically are just ones that were notable for like when they came out or what they did, because there are a lot of fighting games. There's such a high volume. But so I chose two in particular that were made in the 90s and didn't make it until America until way later. So there's Dragon Ball Z Super Boutodend 2, which was originally for the SNS in 93.

But it didn't come to North America until 2015 on the 3DS virtual console. Wow. That is a long time. Yeah. And so Super Boutodend 2 has 10 playable characters and just covers the Cell game saga basically. So it's pretty simple, but it was just, it was bundled, I think, with like a later Boutodan game. And then there's Dragon Balls, the Ultimate Battle 22, which was for the PS1 in 95, and later came to North America in 2003. So much shorter of a gap, but still a gap.

And that one is notable because it used cell drawings from the animators. And that was actually stripped out of the American release. So the American release doesn't have any of those cool sprites. but it was really novel at the time in Japan because they used these cell-shaded sprites for like pre like before the battles for cutscenes before fights and so it was a really cool one that just got totally stripped of everything that made it cool and was just a generic fighting game in the US but yeah those were like the only two game there's three games from the 90s three dragon ball games that made it to America those two didn't even come until the 2000s yeah I feel like like they were sort of scrant, like Dragon Ball Z is huge. Unfortunately, it's been over in Japan for like a decade. So there's no new games to pull from. So they're just pulling these things out of the past to bring two platforms, existing platforms. Yeah. And the only, so the only one and you mentioned it was Final Bout, Dragon Ball G.T. Final Bout is the only 90s dragon ball game that came to the U.S. And it's the only one that came like in the 90s. So it was the first like actual Dragon Ball game that was that was in the West. And it was before GT aired in North America. That is true. It's based on the like, I guess, non-canon Toriyama, post-Torriama Dragon Ball series that, yeah, from 1997 or 1996, something like that. Yeah, it's like 90s and it was localized, I think, in 2003 in the States. And so it was weird that GT final bout came out in 97 for the PS1 way before GT even aired. So it's kind of like this weird dissonance of like this game isn't even a, it's sort of tangentially about characters you recognize, but not. I'm guessing. somebody thought the syndicate episodes would have taken off and they're like, what is the

newest Dragon Ball game? Okay, Dragon Ball GT. I guess we can explain to people what this is later. Yeah, exactly. It's like GT is weird. I haven't watched it, but in doing the research for this, it was like I found out about like the baby saga is what it's called. There's like a whole bunch of stuff that I'm just like, I don't know

what this is. G.T. has a really weird premise in that the first enemy Goku fights garlic, or garlic Jr., or whatever, he, in the first episode of GT, he shrinks Goku back into a child again. So it's sort of like, let's do fighting, but have Goku be a child again.

I don't think it's very good or it's fondly remembered in any way. No, not at all. The only thing is that it was the first Dragon Ball game that came here. It's also the first 3D Dragon Ball game. That was a mistake. Yeah, it was, it's, you know, classic PlayStation 1 graphics.

Yeah. I mean, they could have done a better job. I just remember seeing this, being interested, you know, being a Dragon Ball Z fandom. I'm like, Freezes' tail looks like a bunch of sausage links. Like, it looks awful. Then again, so did Laura Croft's hair. That's true.

Oh, man. Yeah, not a good. Yeah, I have to say graphically, the games have gotten a lot better. Like, I saw footage of fighters today. Oh, God, yes. And I actually thought it was like, oh, someone posted a jiff of the new series. Like super. The one that just ended.

Yeah. But, no, it's actually the game. Like, why don't they just do the anime with those game graphics? Yeah. I mean, they look fantastic. It's, like, perfectly. captures Toriyama's art, which admittedly has a very simplistic, yeah, angular style that translates really well into polygons. But yeah, they've

come a long way since final bout. CyberConnect-2 making that game, or am I wrong? No, it was Arc System Works. Okay. No, they're awesome, too. I mean, CyberConnect-2 makes, made all them Naruto games, and those look just like the anime as well. But yeah, you have your next game on here, and the final one we'll talk about for Dragon Ball is Boodokai. Boodokai. Bodokai. And that is really where, I didn't play any of these games, but I was watching lots of videos and this is where they're like, no, we are going to replicate like events in Dragon Ball with

these at the time high fidelity graphics. So you see a lot of scenes recreated almost like shot for shot as best they can with polygonal graphics. I feel like from this point on there like this will be our intent, this will be our focus, is sort of to make a playable version of the show that looks as much like

the show as possible. Yeah, I mean, and talking about fighters really quickly before we get into Budica, I mean, like that's what fighters is, is like the best version of that. I mean, Fighters has so many Easter eggs. Like, if you beat, oh, my gosh, if you beat, like, Napa, you'll see him, like, as Yamcha. Like, it totally reverses that scene in the show. And, like, there's lots of little nods to people who've been watching the show for a while.

And it's just done so beautifully and, like, that's such a beautiful, saturated art style in that game. But it started with Budokai, I think. And so this is obviously a fighting game. A Budakai translates to martial arts tournament, essentially. And the first martial arts tournament in the manga was the 10 Kaichi Bhudikai or the, Strongest of Under the Heavens Martial Arts Tournament, very hard to say. But, yeah, they, like, mimicked the presentation of the show more in Budakai. And I think it set off there's three more, or two more Budakai games.

And then there's a Tenkaichi Budakai series, which is different in a lot of ways. But that kind of kicked off the fighting game, Dragon Ball Movement. And it's also there hasn't been a single year besides 2013 where at least one Dragon Ball game was not released. So after Budakai, it just completely exploded. Yeah, despite the show ending in 1995, that hasn't stopped a lot of it. I mean, when did Super start? Super is sort of like, it's not a remake. Super started in 2015.

Super is the first canon, like, Toriyama written Dragon Ball series in like 18 years or something like that. And it picks up, like, after the end of Z and just has a new arc. And it's like the universe, there's like a universe six art and like arc. And some of it covers a couple of the movies. But for the most part, it's just new stuff. And so this eventually become the Xenovirce games. And I think these are the games that are like you can sort of like do alternate timelines. Like what if this character won or what if this character fought this character?

And they would sort of retell the story but with like different events happening. That was sort of the gimmick of it all. Yeah, you can kind of play around with it. Like I said, I mean, fighters does this where it's like, what if Yomcha beats Napa instead of the other way around? That's kind of what came back out. That's my ideal timeline. Right? And like you said, the developer dimps later worked on the Xenovirce games, which are more recent Dragonball games.

So we got to take a break soon, and we have to move on to Sailor Moon. But any other final thoughts, I feel like Dragon Ball's gaming legacy has only, I mean, I think it eventually got better. And I think Fighters is really awesome, and I want to play it. But unfortunately, it was kind of like a legacy of garbage for almost 20 years before we got to where we are now. The legacy of Goku or the legacy of garbage. Legacy of garbage is a better name. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, these were notable games that I picked out,

and there's a lot of stuff in there that is just not important at all. Yeah. And we came a long way to get to Fighters. And Fighters is, I think, for a lot of fans, like the game that we were waiting for. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I really like it in that story. I mean, it's like a Dragon Ball story, right? It's not like life-changing, but, like, they introduced a new character, Android 21, who's super cool, and I love her.

That was like, because I think there was a demand, like, there aren't enough female characters who aren't who don't turn into moms in the series exactly i mean like and super kind of has that i mean super has the first female super saying kale um or califla and kale who are sisters um and they have a fusion and stuff um more vegetable names including a very of the moment one in yeah yeah yeah um and so like that's been rectified um or they've started to improve upon that I think there's still a lot more male characters, but I've always loved Dragon Ball's female characters. They're great. I love Bulma a whole lot.

I do love Bulma. So that's it for Dragon Ball. We'll take a break now. We'll come back with a lot of Sailor Moon Chat. So we'll see you on the other side. Last three, big a spy, the weather is mollered, and light,

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Switching makes it easy to save. I'm not I'm sorry, so, I'm... ...and... ...or... ...and...

...the... ...and... ...the... ...and... So we are back, and Sam has been powering up in the corner for the past 50 minutes, and she's ready to unleash an attack of Sailor Moon information against all of us. So I'll let Sam lead the charge here because she is our Sailor Moon experts, and we are all but mere apprentices in her shadow. No, no, no, no.

Collie also knows a good deal about Sailor Moon here. I'm putting a lot of pressure on you now. Geez. Do you want me to take you through the beginning of the anime or the manga? Wherever you want to start. I mean, yeah, I know an okay amount of information about Sailor Moon. So why don't we, like, just do a little roundtable and figure out when did we all first encounter Sailor Moon? Was it all the same?

I, like with Dragon Ball, it was the pre-Tunami random syndication episodes that would show up, like on my local independent station or Fox affiliate or whatever. And I thought it was really cool because I would seek out anything that looked like anime, and I loved anime. But again, maybe I didn't say this before, but there was a certain shame of being like a 13-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy watching Sailor Moon, and no one can know I like this. But yeah, I did see it on the, like, the Dekdub, and then I did watch it on Tsunami.

But I recently watched a lot of it on Hulu. Like, it suddenly showed up on Hulu, like, subtitled, like, for no reason. But I watched, like, 20 or 30 episodes on Hulu. Yeah. Yeah, so Hulu has the rights to it now, and they have the Viz re-dub, which is if you miss the dub, but you know that it's terrible. It fixes a lot of the original problems. I also watched it on TV, like, I think before it was on Tsunami. I can't really remember.

It was 95. That's when the syndicated package aired on, like, American TV. Yeah, so it was probably around then or a little bit later. I just remember, like, being really excited because it was a show where there were, like, multiple girls. And, like, I don't know. There's not a lot of stuff where there's always, like, the token girl. I was very excited. This is about five girls who are friends who fight bad guys together.

And it was cool because there wasn't a lot of action roles for girl characters. Yeah, it was just like, oh, you're the love interest girl, and all the boys are going to go do things. Yes, or a lot of, I feel like a lot of cartoons geared towards, American cartoons geared towards young girls at the time were like magical creatures and not actual people. Yeah. Like my little pony, yeah. That's what I was thinking of that. And there was a lot of that. Yeah.

And so Sailor Moon was a new thing for us to consume and enjoy. So my first experience with Sailor Moon was through the tsunami. I saw the Deak sub and I mean the dub. And I was very young at the time. I think I was only eight years old. And so I didn't really realize quite how bad the dub was. I was just like, girls and costumes, different colors, kitty cats. And I was like really into that.

And you're sold, yeah. Yeah, and I was like sold. It wasn't until I was in the beginning of first years of high school. My friend had the movies that she'll be borrow, Sailor, Moon, the S movie, R movie, and Super S. And those movies, I hadn't seen the series from start to finish, but those movies are what made me rewatch the whole thing. Yeah, I saw R, I think R at the Alamo, like a couple. years ago because they have like a special airing. Yeah, those movies are fun.

If they have a Sailor Moon movie airing, any of them, call me. We're not about it. What about you, Jeremy? So I was aware of Sailor Moon when it was first airing. The Bear Naked Lady's song? Sure. No, I was, okay, so it was being localized around the time that I was starting to like finally say, oh, Anami, cool.

And so, you know, I was picking. up stuff like Akira and Rahma One Half and Battle Angel Alita. So I was aware that there was this Sailor Moon thing and it was very definitely something from Japan, but it was thoroughly and heavily marketed toward young girls. So I was like, oh, well, that's not for me. So I completely overlooked it. I wasn't like dismissive of it. I was just like, you know, this is like a cartoon for kids and it's not my, you know,

it's not directed toward me. So I never looked at it. I think I might have read a few of the manga chapters that were localized in Mix Zine, if you guys remember that. Oh, yeah. The attempt by, I think, Viz to bring over, like, you know, a Shonen Jump-style phone book, cheap paper, lots of colored paper-style manga thing. But it didn't really, like, click with me. But, you know, over time, I've come to appreciate, what is their name, sorry, Naoko Takeuchi, like, the fact that her work was very fashion-forward, very progressive in a lot of ways.

and, you know, very, very much spoke to younger women and in a way that I think, you know, anyone can enjoy. It's just like, it passed me by, and I've never had a chance to go back and read it. But I would be interested someday in reading the manga. Probably not watching the anime, but I enjoy manga, so I'd probably get a kick out of the show, the books if I read them, but I haven't, so I can't really contribute to that. I think it's worth mentioning that. Naoku, you guys can make fun of me.

I'm going to butcher all the Japanese names. But Naoku Takuchi, she is married to Yoshihiro Togashi, which is the creator of Yu-Yu-Hakashone Hunter Hunter. They together are like some manga power couple. It's like the Shojo Shonen power couple. Right. Which I think is amazing. They have an incredible legacy, particularly hers I identify with her impact on young girls. So to start, where did Sailor Moon start?

It started as a magazine comic strip. It was actually called Sailor V. Before there was Sailor V. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. So the character that is like the video game heroin or whatever that Sailor Moon loves was that was the beginning of Sailor Moon? The comic?

Yep. Yes. So, yeah, it was like a little zine comic about Sailor Venus and her cat Artemis. Yeah. And Sailor Venus, like her, like it's almost like an alter ego being Sailor V like with the sunglasses and it's like a different outfit, but that's her like pop idol. Yes, she is like an idol, like a Japanese idol. She's an idol.

And I've always really liked Sailor Venus and Sailor V for that. But that was the original. Yeah, that was the original. It gained popularity, and they decided they were interested in making it a longer series. Eventually, they did side with Sailor Moon and her Cat Luna instead of following Sailor Venus' whole story arc. Which is funny because it sounds a lot like Hannah Montana. Oh my God They ripped off Sailor Moon

It doesn't make sense for Venus to have a cat named Artemis anyway That's Earth's Moon Come on That's true This is true You know I've never thought of that but yeah Astronomy facts Yeah there are a few

Mythology straight folks Spacebacks There are a lot of So Nakutakuuchi She studied chemistry before she became a manga artist And I didn't know that I studied chemistry before I became a loser Before I became a wee.

Who does video game things. So, yeah, she studied chemistry, and that's why so many of the characters in the manga have, you know, elemental names or figures like the whole crystal thing and even her fascination of planets. So it's all rooted in her study of science, which is very interesting. So it was serialized. Bob, do you want to take it away with some of these? hardcore facts that you have about the manga here.

So, in terms of the manga, I mean, I don't know when the manga came over here, but in Japan, it was 18 volumes from 91 and 97. In terms of when it came to America, it was packaged as a 65 episode syndication package in 1995. But it didn't do very well, much like Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. So that is why, like Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Cartoon Network could pick it up cheaply and have a ton of content and then have a hit on their hands, like without them even realizing it. at first. Yes. I think that should we like really dive into the dub of the version that was onto, like the reason why Sailor Man became popular was because of the Deak

dub, Onchidami. Yeah, and a lot of the names are changed, first of all. A lot of the details are changed. Like we talked about with Dragon Ball and with like other Shonen, this was a similar thing where they were trying to market it to younger people. There were a couple of like morality things. Yeah. Specifically, Sailor, Uranus and Sailor Neptune have a.

relationship in the dub they are cousins and so it's called the kissing cousins dub for a lot of people because they're always very close to each other they are always because they're partners and they just totally censored that out and made them cousins so earlier on when we were talking about what they did to the dragon ball anime and how they kind of you know reworked it for children they did the very same thing with sailor moon not only was the kissing cousins thing a thing. There was a lot of very subtle changes. They even, like, in her magical girl transformation from Serena, which is her name in the dub, to Sailor Moon, in English, the first English dub, to Sailor Moon, she has, she has actual boobs.

Oh, wow. And she goes completely naked. And I do want to really quick aside, that dates back to cutie honey, which is big a new series soon. That show is actually coming back. But that dates back to, like, the cutie honey transformation sequence, which was done. done to make it a more appealing show to boys, even though it was originally, like, targeted more towards girls. And they ended up taking that out.

And in the, there's a lot of little subtle things like that in the Deke version, but they did completely remove her breast lines. And in all the scenes, if even there's cleavage, they cover it up. Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought it was just during the transformations, but yeah, I guess, hmm. Yes, it's kind of a. No cleavage allowed. Yes.

It was a very, you know, it was America in the 90s where, like, post-Aragonism, conservatives. Also, it's supposed to be four girls, like young girls. So they're like, oh, we're going to make it appropriate for all ages. Yeah, for all ages. Because bodies aren't appropriate for any ages. We should be ashamed of them at all times. But, yeah, so those are some of the changes. And in general, sexuality was the topic of sexuality and death were both kind of,

muted in the original dubs, not just with Sailor, Uranus, and Neptune, but also with the complete removal of the starlights, the Sailor Starlights, which were these figures that I actually forget their full story

arc and their purpose, but they were men who essentially did a magical girl transformation into women. And it was I guess too controversial of a thing for them to even approach in the localization, so they completely cut it. And there were a lot of things like that. Yeah.

I remember this is one of the more obvious ones, but the first two henchmen, hench people of Queen Barrel, zoocyte, and what is the other one's name? Oh, oh my God. I actually have it. I know. I put it in our notes, actually. Coincite. Coincite. They're a gay couple.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. I was just adding to the story. Oh, yeah, they're a gay couple, and I didn't know that. I watched the deke dub, and they turned one of them into a woman. But then when I was watching the Hulu subtitle version, this is not a judgment call on my part, but it was shocking to realize, like, how much they change, where it is a man holding another man as he dies.

And the man being held says, if I want to die, let me die beautifully. And I'm like, I can't believe they thought they could, you know, put this on kids TV in 1995. But it was like, no, that's a woman now. That's a woman now. Yeah, no, if they made it a woman, it was okay, though. Yeah, if you make it het, it's appropriate. Right, which is what I was saying earlier, to you off the record. But it was very gender normative in a way.

And even Naku Takuchi was pretty, despite having gay characters in the anime and in the manga, she still didn't like certain choices that were made when they transformed it into an anime in the first place. like the Sailor Starlights that I mentioned in, they're not transsexual, they're just cross-dressers, but even the idea that they would be trans. There's something along those lines that she didn't like. So while it was very progressive in some ways, it was also like, it was the 90s.

It was the 90s. It's also Japan. Yeah, in Japan. That too. Yeah, it's just a different perspective and values and everything. Like you look at Romano one half and it's kind of. kind of bold and daring, and sometimes you're kind of like, actually, no.

Yeah, Ronma is another instance of a male character having a female, like, version. And if you describe it, it sounds horribly problematic. But the show, it's watching, especially the early parts of the show, is like you don't get that sense at all. I do think, like, when you're talking about anime and manga, you do have to take into account, like, if we're looking at it from a Western lens, and we're going to have a different interpretation of those things.

And I think Sailor Moon is very progressive for 90s, Japan in a lot of ways. Yeah. And even those characters, I mean, like, it's very important to have queer characters for a lot of people. I know that was very formative for a lot of people, like, just my friends and myself. Well, the discovery of it was, I think before anybody in America got their hands on the original version, they didn't know. Yeah, exactly. So it was almost like an after effect. I saw this article going around like two or three years ago,

which was like how queer teens in the 90s identified with that. And I'm like, that's so silly. They wouldn't have even known that those characters were lovers because we didn't have access to the original anime then. But there's like something about it that you identify with and subconsciously. And then like just talking to friends of mine who went back and read the manga and we're like, wow, this is so much gayer than I thought. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's so much more sexual in general. Like, so, like, the, even the romance between Usagi and, uh, Mamor, yes, uh, it's pretty, like, you know, it's like, something that was so important to you in your childhood and then finding out it was queer as heck. He's like, oh, sweet. I think, um, Japan seems to have a fascination with the idea of, like, uh, magical gender change or gender change, like a sudden one because like... Androgyny is very popular. Oh, yeah. But, like, so Ron Ma and Sailor Moon, but also, like, the most popular movie of all time, your name is,

is about characters who change bodies and thus change genders have to get used to the lives as a different gender. And I feel like that is like sort of a fascination that culture might have. Or like they feel like an interesting story could come out of that. Definitely. Well, in Japan, it was very clear to me when I spent my time there that men and women don't. They live very separate lives from each other except in their relationships. And so maybe that's like a product of their cultural norms, right? It could be, yeah.

But, yeah, so back to the anime. The last thing I want to talk about the Deekdub before we move on is the Sailor Says. Oh, yeah. Sailor Says. These are all on YouTube, by the way, and they're funny. They're pretty funny. They're funny. They're ridiculous.

They're these little advice segments that were required by, I want to say, the FCC or something. Yeah, I think like post-Ragan era, maybe Reagan era television. was like, okay, you are just selling toys. So some element of this needs to be educational, either like in a moral sense or some other sense. You can't just have fun. And so these were, no fun allowed. Because it gave us, you know, the Finzler films,

pork chop sandwiches. I just think of the Animaniacs' Wheel of Morality whenever I see any of this stuff. Animaniacs embraced it and just made fun of it at the same time. Yeah. So all these Sailor says things can be watched on YouTube. I run back recently for this episode to watch a few and realized how ridiculous some of the advice was, but also how, like, it was clearly

geared towards girls in a way that, like, um... Was by male executive. Yeah. It was very strange. I'll pick out some of them. There was a piece of advice to wear sunscreen because if you don't wear sunscreen, your skin will age and you will get wrinkly. I mean, true, but not the most important reason to wear sunscreen.

The other one was be sensitive to other people's feelings. And there was a lot of that, like, you know, be nice to people who are bad, which was like a very common theme I saw in some of the... That is big. Which is something that's so often marketed to girls is like, oh, you know, just be polite. Yeah, be polite no matter what. If somebody was bad to you, be nice because being nice is important. Sailor Moon says you can fix him. It's possible.

No, basically. I'm going to be able to be. And then another one I really liked was Don't be jealous of other girls who like the same boys as you And they used Sailor Jupiter in this Because in the anime, she was like a flirt She loved all the boys And so like, yeah, it was very, very silly

Which is funny because she's like the most tomboyish delinquent of all of them She is. Of the main girls. She is the most tomboyish, but also the most boy crazy. These were also on the Sonic the Hedgehog D. Cartoon, but they got into things like drugs and possible inappropriate touching kind of things. Did Sailor Moon ever get that deep into those dark issues where it was just like more fluffy stuff, like the stuff you talked about? You mean like touching on the topic of drugs inside the anime? Oh, in the Sailor Says.

Yeah. Sonic says ones were like Sonic says. Yeah, no smoking. No, the darkest I saw, and I think I watched a lot of them. I watched a good 30 minutes of Sailor Says. The darkest one I saw was one that seemed to be like anti-eating disorder. And it was about eating. Yeah, eat well.

I mean, who's pro-eating disorder? Yeah. But that was the craziest one I saw. The heaviest topic. The heaviest topic. I mean, like, in those dubs, they didn't even want to talk about death. Like, death was, you say Goku died like a thousand times, right? Like, he's always dying.

In Sailor Moon, they didn't even, like, they insinuated death, but they never, characters never died in the local, the localization, the first one. Yeah, they kept it very fluffy, very lighthearted for girls. It wasn't until the newest, Callie, the newest. The new Vizdub, the Vizdub, yeah, where you can. see the entire series the way it's supposed to be in English. And the characters retain their Japanese names. So obviously, like, Sailor Moon is Usagi.

Usagi, yeah. Which just means rabbit. Bunny. Which is why she has little bunnies all over everything. But she wouldn't have known watching the dub. It's like how Serino. Ties into the moon mythology. She's a rabbit on the moon.

I think her... Her name is Usagi Tsukino, which means like the moon rabbit. Yeah, her name is a big pun. But yeah, the 200 episodes of this anime, and I think like every season, quote, unquote, it was rebranded, like R.S, Super S, Sailor Stars. and I don't know how long the first anime series. That's the one I know the best. Like, that's the one I've seen the most of.

But I know a lot of new character. Like, I was doing research, I'm like, how many Sailor Scouts are there? 20. There are a lot of Sailor Scouts. There's a lot of them. More than there are planets. There's weird ones in the manga, too, that we never see. You just know they exist, like, Sailor Mermaid.

Yeah. Are they, like, the lanterns, basically, from D.C.? Like, there's all these lanterns out in space doing stuff. Yeah, they're just like, they're out there. They're doing their thing. They all have missions. They'll have castles. Yeah, but then the ones named after the planets hang out together and go to the mall.

Well, the planets have crystals. From what I remember, I haven't watched the whole thing in at least 10 years, but each of the planetary sailors have, like, crystals that they're supposed to. Which is the origin of the, it's a similar thing to Dragon Ball Z-Kai. There's Sailor Moon Crystal, which is a retelling. Right. The first two seasons are real bad. The animation's not good.

I heard that. I would recommend watching the re-dub or the same. sub rather than crystal. One of the reasons I enjoy this as an adult, like going back to it, was I noticed that I didn't pick up on it as a kid, but like, at least in the anime, I've not read the manga, and I think the manga's

a bit softer and the characterization is a bit different, but in the anime, the main character is the comic relief. Like, she kind of sucks and she's a brat and... She's a cry baby. Yeah, she doesn't want to do anything. It reminds me of, like, I love the anime Slayer, so it's like, the main character is the comic relief. She's like, she is like a scoundrel, and she's like,

she's got a heart of gold, but ultimately, she just wants to eat and sleep and steal. It's kind of a manga and anime thing is to have the main character is this sort of, you know, either like milk sop or else, you know, like kind of low-achieving idiot or, you know, unmotivated person who happens to have preternetual talents that come in handy, but you'll get, you know, like, Tenchi Muyo or something. It's always like the main character is, or all those harem anime. Yeah.

You're just like, who is, I guess you're supposed to be able to project yourself into this vanilla human being. I was thinking that, too, like, with big franchises like Harry Potter and, like, Twilight. Yeah. Harry Potter and Twilight are great, like, Western examples of that where it's like, Harry's a idiot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Twilight. Bella is just a person you can project into.

She's you. Yeah. This is, I feel like the thing I was thinking of, and this is a reference that will go over, like, 90% people who are listening to this, and maybe even you guys, but I was a big sex in the city fan. Yeah. And Carrie. Carrie sucks.

Carrie sucks. Carrie is the main character, just, you know, I'm Miranda, thank you. I've seen enough of it to agree with you. I've seen enough of it to agree with you. I've seen all of it because my wife loves it. I'm a thing. It's awesome.

I love that show so much. It makes me angry because I am a writer. I'm like, how did she write one article a month and then live in this amazing? And her articles suck. It was just like, here's my friends and I hung out. Here's a story. And I have so many expensive designer purses. I keep them in my stove.

I'm getting angry all over again. She wrote a blog anyway. Also, basically, like what I'm saying is like, How did Sailor Moon save the day over and over again? She was an idiot. With her friends, the help of her friends. The help of her very smart friends. She does have sort of a redemption arc.

Like, she does improve. Yeah, yeah. She can pull her shit together when she needs to. And she's the one that keeps them together. And that's like the thing that was so appealing to it as a kid at least. Yeah, definitely. Just to like recap, I don't, I have like some of the story notes here. But just like to recap the story in the beginning for people who haven't seen it,

a girl finds a cat, Sasaki finds a cat, Luna. She discovers, she awakens and discovers that she has like these magical powers. And then slowly, other girls in her high school and the area awakened to discover their magical powers. They start fighting all these bad guys

that are attacking them. If they don't know why, they're like, oh, all this bad stuff's happening, let's fight, beat them up. And eventually they figure out that in their previous lives, they were members of the ancient moon kingdom in a period of time called the Silver Millennium. And it's the dark kingdom that's waging war against them.

And so, like, all these enemies that they encounter are basically from the dark kingdom or the negaverse. They, like, talk about the negaverse a lot. Yeah, a lot of that. Yeah. Another cool inversion of, I guess, the standard, this is a show about women and they are, they often have to rescue the male hero, Tuxedo Mask. He is the one who's getting kidnapped.

He's a buffoon. Yeah. He is a buffoon. Yeah. He really is. He's kind of a huge dork. Does he have powers, or is he just a dude in a tuxedo with a rose in his mouth? No, he actually has crystal powers, too, and he is the keeper of the Earth crystal.

We don't know why. You never find out. But he's a big old dork. And I do credit Sailor Moon with my attitude towards relationships now, because I'm always like, I'll fight anybody. And every guy I've ever dated has just been like, okay. So you fell in for the tuxedo masks in your life. Totally, yeah, yeah. But the rose is nice.

I like that. I like it. Romance. You know, I finally found a. good version of tuxedo. Let's just say that. But yeah, I do also want to touch on, like, the fact that it's an ensemble cast of women so you can kind of, like, figure out who you relate to the most. And that's changed for me as I've gotten older, which I've really enjoyed, like, just seeing, like, who I align with the most at any point in my life. I don't know.

Who's your favorite? Of all the Sailor Scouts? When I was a kid, I liked Sailor Mars because I thought that she was really, like, pretty. She had long hair and the red skirt. She wore heels. She was the only one that wore heels. And then when I watched it again, when I was old in high school, I really like Sailor Jupiter because she was, like, the cool girl. Yeah.

I liked Southern Mercury, and then I liked Jupiter. On the record, I am Sailor Mercury because she's the millhouse of the group, kind of. So, fun fact, in Japan, Sailor Mercury is actually the favorite Sailor Scout because she is studious and very smart. So that's why I liked her so much as a kid. I was like so into school. I didn't have any friends. Like all I did was like study and I was like all about her.

And then I got older and I was like, no, I'd want to beat somebody up. I'm Jupiter. It's funny. They really like show off her smarts in the show where they try to. And sometimes they even poke fun at it. Like there is a episode where they receive this like fact. I guess it's like a fax message or something. There's a lot of like data technology in the original.

Japan still uses faxes. Yeah. I mean, some people in America still use faxes too. They should be stopped. I mean, they still use flip phones pretty commonly. Yeah. Anyway, so there's like this message that comes through in English and she has to translate it. And it's really funny because they're all like, oh, my God, because she just like translated it in English.

And then you look, you see the paper and it's actually a, oh, my God, it's a song. It's like song lyrics. It's such a funny little Easter, like Easter egg in the show. But anyway, so, yeah, so Japan always really likes Sailor Mercury. because of her personality. I wonder what America's favorite Sailor Scout would be. I feel like it was soggy because she's just relatable because Americans hate school. This is true.

She likes to eat and she's dumb. She loves video games too. Her favorite class is lunch. Yeah, this is true. It would be a saggy. That's why I thought this show was cool as like a 12-year-old or 13-year-old. In the first episode, she's like playing video games. And you would never see anyone playing video games on TV in a cartoon,

let alone a girl playing video games. Yes. So I was like, girls play video games? So there is a reference to the original magazine comic strip, well, I don't know what they would call it in Japanese. It's not like a comic strip, but Sailor V. There's reference in the anime where they have the Sailor v arcade cabinets that they use as like a portal. Yeah. Just a funny little, funny little tidbit.

Yeah, I like Usagi because she like goes to an arcade. Like she loves the arcade. I'm like, I love the arcade. It's funny. In Japan, that's like a very boyish. thing to like. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

When I spend my time there, I was often the only girl in the arcade. I'm still the only girl in the arcade half the time. Yeah. I think what stands up to me for this, and this maybe this is a cynical marketing decision by the author, who knows. But I feel like Japan is very good about, like, theming in shows that really carries forth a message show. Like every character is a very distinct personality.

They each have a different color, a different weapon, a different symbol, a different attack. They're very good about like these very strong differences between characters. I mean, with the colors and the team and the theme and the And the blood type, you can't forget the blood type. The blood type. They always have a blood type. It's very centi. Yeah, I haven't thought about that.

Yeah, I mean, this is like the girl's cartoon version of Power Rangers basically. Yeah, I mean, I thought of Power Rangers immediately because that aired before this in America and it was every week or every day the main villain sending down a monster that will interfere in their normal lives and they have to fight them as their superhero, you know, alter egos. Yeah, and I was always so into Power Rangers. but it did seem like it wasn't for me because it was marketed more heavily towards boys. Yes, you know. And this is how I feel like it was very clear in the way that Dragon Ball Z was and the way

that Sailing Moon was that they were marketed to young boys and young girls very separately. I think it was Pokemon. That was the first one that like the first anime in America that bridged that. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's cute animals. Everybody loves cute animals. That fight. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean for me like I had a lot of the, I had a lot of internalized misogyny growing up and And so I was definitely like, I'm going to be like a cool girl who likes boy stuff. And having older cousins who were boys, they were like my older brothers, basically. I kind of got a little bit of both. But, yeah, with Sailor Moon, it was like, oh, this is definitely something I can seek out on my own. Like, this is something for me. And the Pokemon was the next step of that where it was like, oh, this is kind of like the bridging the gap where I'm allowed to like this.

Yeah. I felt that way about this is like, I'm going to branch off here. But I felt that way about the marketing of Xbox console versus. PlayStation consoles. I remember PlayStation using a lot of, like, their RPGs and anime, I mean, and, like, Final Fantasy was a big point for them in showing off their exclusives and TV commercials. And those are not necessarily for, they don't seem very male or female. You know, like they just seemed beautiful and interesting and fun. And I, that's, that's why I got a PlayStation was because of the exclusives that they marketed with, with Xbox. I remember Xbox. I remember Xbox.

live, the Xbox Live commercials, which was like a bunch of boys being like, yeah, we're going to be playing Halo, like, yeah. That was just like the general vibe. So I never felt like I could play. That wasn't for me. It just felt like, oh, this is not for you. I think it was a console for the boys' dorm. Finally, video games for men.

I think like that is definitely a Western company with a very limited perspective saying, oh, yeah, only men play video games. So why do we care about like all of this, to be cynical, all this money we could leave on the table? not just talking about inclusion, but like they, maybe Japan was more used to having a female audience for some things that normally wouldn't hear. Right. And that was, I mean, I, obviously, I'm going to reiterate myself a bunch of times this episode. That's kind of what I was getting at with talking about like American cartoons versus Japanese animation being like a different kind of spectrum and having stuff that felt like, oh, this is exclusive. Like I read a lot of fruits basket when I was in middle school.

I was like, oh, this is like a girl's thing and this is my thing and I can own this. and it's a character I can relate to. And, like, Sailor Moon was the first instance of that. Yeah, definitely. I would agree. Do we want to get into the games? We can get to the games, yeah. Oh, wait, wait.

I have one more random fact that I wanted to bring up. And then I totally forgot. But because when you were talking about their, like, alter egos, like, you know, their sailor egos and then their actual high school character. Yes. How the heck did Tuxedo Mask and Sailor Moon? not realize that they, like, realize their actual identities for, like, 47 episodes. It is sort of like the Clark Kent problem where it's like, that man with glasses is a

totally different person. I guess it's just a conceit. It's all about their carriage. Yeah. Have you seen that clip of Christopher Reeve, like, straightening up when he changes his, his identity? Yes, but, I mean, he can't change his face, but I guess that's enough. But he puts on the big, ugly glasses. Yeah.

Yeah. Just say it's moon magic. Yeah. Moon magic can't do it all. Yeah. But, yeah, the game, so like Dragon Ball, most of these are not very good, but they're not trying to be that ambitious. I think most of them are just like Final Fight-style brawlers. And then there are like, there's a straight-up fighting game, but they have to like come up with a concocted reason why these characters would fight each other.

So maybe Sam can walk us through some of these that we have here. So starting in 1993 with, I'm going to be shojo-senshi, Sailor Moon. Thank you. Thank you, Callie. There were 20 Sailor Moon games that had been released in Japan by 1998. So that is a lot of games in a five-year span. 20 games, five years, it's what, four games a year? Wow, I guess Sailor Moon only really existed for six years in Japan, too,

so they had to cash in while the cash in was good. Yes, and of those games, none of them came to North America. Sad, real sad. Yeah, I guess there was not, again, like the Dragon Ball problem where by the time it was popular in America, it was dead in Japan for years and years, and there were no reboot series, so they couldn't just, like, reach back in time. It's surprising that they didn't even, like, scrub stuff. of these like they did with Dragon Power or the Ronma one-a-half game that they turned into street

combat and had nothing to do with Romma, but they were just like, we believe in the quality of this generic brawler to bring it over. Is that Ramma one-half hard battle or is hard-battle a different one? No, hard battle came over. It was Ronma one half. It was the one before that. It was like the characters were all changed and all the Romma elements were taken out. So it's just like the framework of a mediocre fighting game that had no license connection to appeal to anyone. So Bishogor Senshi Sailor Moon. Did I say it right?

Okay, cool. It basically translates to pretty soldier, Sailor Moon, and it was a side-scroller beat-em-up. It was developed by Angel and published by Bandai. And it's basically like Streets to Rage of Sailor Moon. I mean, give or take some details, but it's very much, it's a multiplayer side-scroller where you beat up hordes of random enemies. There are several stages with different bosses. from the anime, and the first game very much follows the story of the first series,

the first season of Sailor Moon. I didn't want to play any of these games, the brawlers, or the fighting games, but what I liked about them are the sprites are extremely big because the way most Jojo characters are stylized, they're like 80% legs. Yeah. So they're very, they're characters you don't see moving around in video games very often. Speaking of legs, Sailor Mars in the game can only fight with her legs. Oh, wow.

Classic. Is she handcuffed or something? She knows Capera. Okay, that makes sense. Literally me and Karatea, I only did leg moves. I was like, yeah, because I was so weak. Why punch and you can kick? Yeah, exactly.

That makes so much more sense. Each of the characters had a melee attack and a charged, like, ranged projectile. Yeah, and some characters were pretty good and were slower and had higher damage and others were not. So, for instance, Sailor Jupiter, she was kind of slow, but she was super powerful. powerful and had a really good combo. She was arguably the strongest character in the game, whereas Sailor Mercury, sadly, was quick, but did low damage.

And in this game, the projectiles were pretty much useless because the charge time took too long. So there was that. I also want to shout out. Jimmy Hoppa, he has a YouTube channel, about import games. It was really useful in getting me these details because, sadly,

I never got the chance to play these games. Yeah, we'll link to his stuff and the other person you have listed here on the blog when we post this episode. Absolutely. But I want to say no thanks to Miami Mike. I remember what he did at Dragon Kong. Oh my God, I'm so happy you brought up Miami Mike. Listen, I didn't listen to the podcast yet.

Don't tell me what happened at DragonCon. I'm on the edge of my seat right now already. So earlier when we were talking about France, being like ahead of the curve, this game was localized in France. So they also got things that we named. They got lots of cool anime stuff that we did not get. Yeah, but they had to play it in Paris. Hal mode, so that's not. Oh, my God, you guys, we aboos, like OUI. Oh, my gosh. Nailed it. I didn't make that connection. We, we, get it, boo. Sorry, I'm so sorry.

We should be proud of that. I'm going to leave a baby dad joke. It's weird. I'll edit that out for $100. Also, an interesting fact is that all the voices in the first game were done by the original voice actors for the TV show. So that's pretty cool. I like that. The second game I've listed is Bishozo Sanchi Sailor Moon R, which is the second version of the same game, basically. It's a side-scarled beadmup. And this one was not developed by Angel. It was actually both made and published by Bandai. And they expanded on...

So it follows the story of Sailor R, but instead of focusing on the environments and the enemies as much, they sort of scaled that down and they made gameplay a bigger priority. it seems in this game. They adjusted a lot of things to make it more fun. They also made it so you can interact with your other players. So you can like toss each other at enemies and they had like combo moves that you could do with your friends. They also like shortened at the charge time on the projectiles to make them useful. And there are all these little, just little interesting gameplay elements that was not in the first version of the game.

It's pretty amazing that the first three games we're talking about were all the same year for the same platform. Yes, 1993. There was no shortage. Super Famicom. That's Bondi for you. Yeah. Pumping them out.

So in each of those first two games, the five original Sailor Scouts were the only playable characters, except in Sailor R, there was like an easy mode that you could use Chibi Usa. Oh, Chibisa. She was short, so she missed most of the attacks from the enemies. So you could literally just walk around. and they, like, wouldn't hurt you. And I considered this, I put it in my notes here, but it reminded me of playing odd job in 007,

so it's just, like, short. Yeah, the same year, that's the same year that Rondo of Blood came out for PC Engine, and that had a mode where you could play as Maria Renard, who was, like, a nine-year-old girl, who, I don't think enemy attacks missed her, but, like, she was way more powerful and way easier to use than the main hero.

So, like, playing as the little girl became, like, easy mode for that game, too. Yes, yeah, this was... There was a thing happening, something in the air. Definitely. It was, you know, it was aimed for younger or unskilled players who wanted to get through. So the next thing I have listed is, and now you're absolutely going to have to do this one for me, Cal. All right. Bishogio-S. Sailor Moon is Jogai Ronto, Shuiyak, Sodatzen. Which translates to outer ring brawl, fight for the lead. Well, pretty soldier Sailor Moon, outer ring brawl, fight for the lead.

It's a fighting game. So, eh, sort of a fighting game. it's like it uses the engine from the first two games and allows the players to use the game engine to fight each other, brawl style. Yeah, it feels like this was kind of an odd fit because I guess that was like the fanfic in your head, like what if these characters fought each other? But it feels like an odd fit for a Sailor Moon game.

They're mostly like brawlers. Definitely. And this game reminded me there's a Dragon Ball game. Super Butodan. Yeah, that's one of the ones I listed was the Super Boutodend to... Yes. So that Sailor Moon game was a lot like Sailor Boutedin.

It didn't have the split screen thing, so you couldn't like just travel all over the map. But it was very similar. That one is, I mean, I only watched a little bit of it. It seemed like it was a cool thing, but it wasn't like, probably wasn't super, you know, popular, not like the first game. Right. But now the main attraction. Oh, oh, wait, another, oh, wait, before I get to my main attraction. Okay, this is going to blow some minds.

You could also, in the Sailoran Fighting game, you could play a Sailor Neptune, Pluto, and Uranus. Ooh, the outer sent she. Yes, except not Saturn for some reason. Yeah, it's kind of sad. Some reason I like Saturn. I know. What happened to Sailor Pluto after the planet Pluto was demoted to Planet Toyed? She cried forever.

Has that been addressed in canon yet? No, I don't think so. Does she just remove from crystal? Right, she doesn't get her powers anymore. Oh, my God. She never awakens or whole, you know, she doesn't have a moon. It's tragic. I still believe him.

Pluto. I believe in Pluto, too. So this is the moment I've been waiting for probably my entire life. You need a drum roll here? I'll edit one in. Yes, drum roll please.

This game, it's Bishojo-Senchi Sailor Moon, Super S, for the Sega Pico. Came out in 1995, two years after the original Pretty Soldier Sailor Marine game. So for those of you who are listening who don't know what a Sega Pico is, it was a

children's console that was made using the same hardware that was in the Sega Genesis, and it was amazing. It was the best Sega console that ever came out. It was, no, I'm just exaggerating. I mean, this era, there were like 17 Sega consoles at the same time. There's like Genesis, the Nomad, the Game Gear, the Sega CD, the 32X, the Saturn. The pico? One at a time.

And the pico was the best. Yeah. It had a, so how did the pico work? Like, you got, like, books with the games or whatever? So the pico had a hard plastic cover around it that had a handle on it. You could carry it, like, a briefcase. And, like, a game game. Yes, it was like a gigantic 3DS.

It was like a big old clam shell. It was pretty similar to the Apple eBook or e-mate. Was that what it was called? I don't know. There was like a, they took their Newton technology and turned. it into like a heavy plastic clamshell, super simplistic laptop. That's what Pico always reminded me up. Yes.

And you would open it up and on the top there was an insert where you could put these books. It was like a cartridge book insert. And it was developed to be like an educational system for kids. And that was like the whole like book aspect. You know, you put your book in your console. And it knew when you would turn the pages of the book and the display on the TV would change when you would turn the pages. And on the bottom part of the console, you had like this electromagnetic pen and it simulated like a touch from the pen to the tablet. There was like a, it was crazy.

There wasn't actually, it was, it didn't have an actual sensor. It was some type of like magnetic thing going on that probably told the game what to do. But it allowed you to like draw on the tablet. And there were lots of like drawing games. And you could use the pen to interact with. things on the screen and stuff. I'm so jealous. I love my genesis and I didn't even know this existed. This reminds me of the Wii U for some reason. And I like the Wii U. The Pico, I have very fond memories of it as a child. I had many, my mom loved it and

happily bought me Pico books, little Pico cartridge cartridges. And sadly, I never got to play the Sailor Moon Super-S game for the Pico. What I would do, though. So this game was pretty simple. There were five pages that had different stages, and each page contain an area that could be touched with the console's pen, allowing players to interact with the different levels and characters.

There was a dress-up game, which was like paper dolls for girls. Nice. I don't have to remember paper dolls. I do. It's like, remember that. Paper dolls. There was a drawing game that was very much like the Mario paint tools. They like Sprite can.

You can select all the different colors. Do paper dolls not exist anymore? It's an app now. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's an app for that. They do have dress-up games. They do have dress-up games. Love Nikki.

Yeah. And then there were very simple mini-games for young kids. So like, guess what cup has the ball underneath it? Swish, Swiss, squish. Teaching kids out of gamble. Yeah. Getting there ready to earn some crazy money and Sweener. Balance.

So the other game that you had here, you pointed out, existed that it blew my mind is that there is also a Pokemon game unreleased in America for the Pico. Yes. Okay, this was the first Nintendo game on a Sega machine. Also probably the only? Yeah, probably the only. I mean, I'm not going to, not making those claims, but...

There certainly weren't any on Dreamcast. Yeah, and so that's also a thing that makes the Pico special and also the best console of all time. You heard your first, folks. I didn't even know this existed. You're blowing my mind. Wait till you see what it looks like. It's crazy.

It's like teal and purple. It's ridiculous. I want one. Looks like it was made by Nickelodeon. It does look like it was made by Nickelodeon. It was ridiculous. Did you ever have a leapfrog? Because I feel like it sounds like a leapfrog.

No, get out of gear with that. When I was a kid, I, what is Jeremy showing people? It's actually, it looks exactly like Devastator, the Transformer. This is the Pico. It's got that, like, neon, yellow and purple. This is the best thing to do on an audio-only show. I will put pictures on the bar, but when I... This is what the one that I have looked like.

That green and purple thing. Yeah. See, that's ideal. It's crazy. I want one so bad. When I was a kid in the late 80s, there was a thing called the Socrates, which was the exact same thing. You, like, plug the thing into your TV.

I had like a little touchpad, but that's way more advanced than the... That thing was amazing. Like, I just need to, for a moment. There were, like, lots of games that had, like, art tools in them with the Pico because you could touch the color on the book and then it was, like, the color that you selected would happen on the screen. So you would, like, touch the color on the book and then go to draw and then touch the color on the book and then it would change. And it was amazing. And the, uh, the Pokemon game does not look as interesting as that because it is like, I mean, it is made for Japanese children. And, like, the video that I watched was mostly Pokemon, like, teaching out of trace like Hiragana or Katakana or whatever.

Yeah. And it was like, just teaching you how to write. So it's very, it's very, most of the games to the people are super basic. I wish I'd had that. I wish I'd had that when I was first learning Japanese and then it would have been easier to learn Katakana. I bet you could get a Pico. I bet you could get a Pico, and I bet you could get your hands on these Japanese games. But I already know Katakana.

Pika-chu teaches typing. We are running short of time. Let's go, let's hit one more. So I'll let you choose which of these following you want to hit next. The honorable mentions. Yeah. Well, I think that you should, you should hit the honorablymentment because you actually played this game. I did not, and it's the Sailor Moon RPG.

It is, yeah. I played through it like in 2002, so forgive me if I'm a little fussy on this, but it is a Sailor Moon RPG. I think it might be the, it could possibly be the only one. I could be wrong about this, but someone fan translated is a very, very simple RPG, but it is like literally like 10 hours long. So if you want to play a Sailor Moon RPG, a 16-bit RPG, it's pretty neat. I can't think of anything else that's like it. It's not made by, like, RPG masters or anything like that, but it's just a very fun, like, fluffy RPG, licensed RPG.

It's also called Bishozo Senshi, Sailor Moon, but another story. That's right, another story. It's like alternate, not canon, so don't get mad about it. We could talk about the weird DS game. The weird DS game that came out in 2011, Sailor Moon La Lunas Blend. It's just a puzzle game. It's kind of what the one that, like the game you were talking about, Callie. Oh, Sailor Moon drops the mobile game.

I've played a lot of that. Yeah, it's kind of like that. But the DS1 is based on, like, an Italian version of the series, like an Italian localization or whatever. Yes, yeah. It's very weird. It's an Italy-only game. So there's that. There's not a lot of those.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think this is special. But you know what's funny, though, like, from what I know, in Italy, they really fell in love with the whole magical girl thing. Because they actually came out with a show in the early 2000s called Winks Club. Does anybody remember? I remember Winks Club. I had to cover that. I know what that is.

When Konami published it in the U.S. Yes, it's very Sailor Mooney. But different style, same sauce. You know. I didn't realize that was Italian. It is. It was originally Italian. I thought it was French for some reason.

Maybe because of the whole French anime connection. Yeah. I thought it was French too. I was like a very big fan of Winks Club. That'll be a future episode. We'll have you back for the Winks Club retrospective. But anything final on Sailor Moon before we wrap up, I mean, I feel like if you, again, like

this might have a bad, you might have a bad perception of this series. I say, you go to Hulu. It's a very fun series and it moves very fast. It's not like Dragon Ball in that it's like one fight, we'll take 20 episodes. It's like you're guaranteed a villain and the villain to die in the same episode for most episodes. Pretty much. And that's

all I really want is a deficiently dead villain. It's just like tons of dead villains in your wake. Just tons. Yes. And they're very silly too. Like, I feel like the series, like I've not read the manga, but the anime has a very good sense of humor about the situations it puts the characters in and how they

interact with each other and things like that. And the villains are all ridiculous and for the most part. My favorite movie and I would recommend even if you haven't seen Sailor Moon, this movie is just so much fun. It's the Sailor Moon S movie. Is that the one with the... It's the one where Luna

gets to become princess. Oh my God. I forget her name. I forget her name also. Luna gets to be a human. She gets to be a human princess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the story is so fun that the dialogue and the scenes, they really capture, like, that

whole movie really captures all the good feels of Sailor Moon. There's also a lot of really wonderful romance, and it's very, it's space, and I don't know, it's magical. The whole thing is magical. I say watch that movie, even if you haven't seen the series, it's fun to jump into. Kylie, any final thoughts, Sailor Moon? If you miss the show, but you're familiar with it, definitely I would recommend the Viz re-dub. It's something that I like to watch while I sew.

I actually watched it while I was making a Sailor Jupiter cosplay. But, yeah, if it's like you want to just refresh around the series, they fixed a lot of the problems. I think there's also like a spiritual successor to it made by the anime team. They made Utena. And I think it was just like, what couldn't we do on Sailor Moon? Let's do it here. It's even more like playing with like gender and sexuality. It should be more adults.

The lesbian parts weren't subtext. Yes, exactly. Yeah, they were explicitly lesbians. And in the movie, they changed into cars. I don't know why, but it was just cool to look at. Have you seen what the cars look like? Oh, yes. Yeah.

That kind of explains it. Never mind. I just remember. This is an audio podcast. So, Google Image Search is your friend. So thank you for joining us. Take off Safe Search. Yes.

Oh, boy. So thanks for joining us, folks. This has been Retronauts. This has been our episode about Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon and the games. And we'll do more things like. this in the future. I think it's a lot of fun to look back at these big influences on games and culture that aren't necessarily games themselves. So as for us, we are Retronauts. You can find us at Retronauts.com or looking for Retronauts in any podcatcher of your choice. Go to iTunes.

I don't think Stitcher, but everything that can download podcast can usually download us. And in case you don't know, we are funded completely by Patreon. If you want to help us out, go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And at the $3 level, you can get every episode a week ahead of time and ad-free, and that is the ideal way to listen to Retronauts. That is the best Retronauts listening experience, and it's not a lot for everything we give you every month, so if you're interested in helping the show, and we appreciate it very much. Check out our

Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. And I will let our two new guests go first. You can tell us where we can find you and how we can support you and check out your content. So, Sam. Oh, you can find me on Twitter. Well, probably Callie 2. At Lighthammer. Not a heavy hammer,

but a lighthammer. Spell like you would think. And also on GameSpot. I stream on Thursday is it currently, so come and hang out at the GameSpot stream. Did you, is that your Twitter name because you were sick of people mispronouncing your actual last name? Absolutely. Okay, I thought so. I'm so happy you got that, Bob. Yes.

And I both have a hard-to-pronounce last name and a hard-to-pronounce Twitter handle, so I always do a little song and dance thing. My Twitter handle is Inky-D-O-J-I-K-O-J-I-K-O. It's because I'm clumsy if you know what a Dol-D-D-Gico is. and I'm also on GameSpot depending on when this airs I will either be currently doing a thing every day on GameSpot a video thing or

sometimes doing a video thing but currently I am on the way to launching that but yeah morning a morning show so that's on GameSpot and GameSpot's Twitch and all that stuff yes Jeremy and you know where to find me on the internet I'm GameSpite

on Twitter and also doing the retronauts thing full time. And of course there's my YouTube channel, which is Toasty Frog, and that is my video chronicle series for retronauts where I'm foolishly going through the entire history of Game Boy

NES, Super NES, and putting together full video retrospectives on each and every game in chronological order. Yep. You're doing the Lord's work, Jeremy. Which Lord is that? The Dark Lord. So I have so many plugs. I have to split them up. That's right. I have more plugs for you. So I make a little bit of

my living off of Retronauts. I make most of my living off of my own Patreon and podcast network. That's a Talking Simpsons network. If you go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you'll find all of our podcasts there. So Talking Simpsons, it's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons every Wednesday. And what a cartoon is a different episode of a different cartoon with the Talking Simpsons treatment every Friday. If you go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons and support at the $5 level, you get both of those a week ahead of time in ad free. Yes, I ripped off Retronauts. And we're still talking with lawyers about that. But I have a lot of exclusive content on that Patreon that I do with my friend Henry Gilbert,

including Talking Futurama, Talking Critic, a ton of interviews, a ton of specials. We have, if you sign up immediately, you'll get like 80 podcasts you've never heard before. And I think that sounds pretty good. But as for us at Retronauts, we will see you next Monday for a brand new episode. See you then. I'm going to be. I'm going to be the

I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm the I'm And call her number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, shit. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia and Russia,

investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.