Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon

Dear Infinite Possiblogities,
hurry the fuck up and write something decent before I am driven to hunt down your address and chew through your spine whilst you sleep.
Love always,
Adoring Fan

P.S. Your songs are shit and don't count

This is the kind of letter I'd deserve to get had I actually earned any fans. So anyway I've decided to cease and decist all of my procrastinating and get back to my blog (because lord knows I've missed the old gal). Now I'm sure there are a good number of you out there who are familiar with Sailor Moon, whether it be because you saw the anime on Cheez TV or because you stumbled upon pictures of her and her friends engaging in threesomes with the cast of Dragon Ball Z. But how many of you were aware that they made a live action Sailor Moon series in Japan called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon? Yeah, yeah I know YOU did, put your hand down (you know who you are). Anyway well there is such a thing and I watched it all and I've deemed it blog worthy. So strap yourselves in, for I am going to review and discuss the many ups and downs that is Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Now lets get one little thing out of the way first. Do you like Japanese entertainment and culture? If you answered "no" or some explicit variant on that theme then PGSM is simply not for you. Don't look into it, don't give it a try, just walk away and be thankful that Infinite Possiblogities was here to save you from wasting your precious, precious time. I say this because, quite frankly, if you can't stand bubbly Japanese school girls singing J-Pop karaoke then you will struggle to make your way through a single episode of PGSM without destroying something or commiting some horrible crime. Having said that I must admit to being something of a closet PGSM fan. This is something I could never admit to a good number of my friends because, to be perfectly honest, I deserve to be ridiculed. I certainly enjoyed it more than I ever did the over-played anime series. Anyway, I'm sure some of you may be wondering what in the fuck PGSM is all about, so let's move on to that.

PGSM is the story of 5 teenage girls who have no reservations about getting dressed in public having dormant powers awoken in them by talking cat toys so that they can fight evil shit. Turns out they're not always very good at fighting and so they often get helped out by the love interest known as Tuxedo Mask whose disguise consists of wearing a tuxedo and a mask. Just to give a brief overview of all the costumes the Sailor Scouts all dress like they're going to a costume party to lure out sex offenders in an undercover police sting operation and everone/everything else looks like a Queer-Eyed Power Rangers cast. But I actually liked how the show looked. It's colourful and vibrant and except for the occassional dodgy CGI effect it looks pretty believable.

But enough about the aesthetics. As well as being about hot chicks killing shit there is quite an extensive story of forbidden love, tradgedy and the search for identity woven in with the rather camp beat 'em up. The story itself is fairly straightforward in esscence however it is on many occassions made unneccessarily complicated by weird pacing. There are some points where the story moves painfully slowly to reach conclusions that are immediately obvious to the audience assuming they aren't brain damaged and then there are times where the plot twists and turns at a bewildering pace. Oh and I hope you like flashbacks, because PGSM has flashbacks in spades. There is this one kinda cute scene where Usagi offers her love interest some pastry thing that you will get very sick of seeing. Seriously, they must flashback to that moment about 12 times throughout the series. We're not goldfish guys, we can remember that these guys are into each other. Having said that, the story is still quite easy to follow, with maybe the exception of the ending. The ending isn't exactly confusing per se, but it has that "what the fuck was all that about?" quality that seems to plague the endings of so many animes (what happened when Mr. Serano opened the car door at the end of GitS: Stand Alone Complex? How come Section 9 allowed Kuze to get killed at the end of 2nd Gig? What the fuck was the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion all about!?!). I mean I get it's supposed to be symbollic and lightly philosophical but does that really mean we have to be confused too? Oh and one more thing *SPOILER ALERT* Since when did it become stock standard for anime series to end with the destruction and rebuilding of the world and/or the self? I mean I know it can be an interesting way to end a series but it can be a little anticlimactic at times. *SPOILERS OVER*

Actually speaking of anime stereotypes PGSM does play out much like an anime would and conforms to a lot of the perplexing things that animes never really explain. How come Japanese people are so accepting of the fact that monsters have just started popping up? How come nobody can recognise people who are dressed in costumes that actually reveal more of their body than regular clothes? How come Japan can't last a full series without shoehorning in some annoying, kookie child (I mean they made her out of a cat...what IS that!?!)? How come the transformation of only girl who clearly hasn't hit puberty is the most overtly sexual? How come everybody is always singing the same J-Pop song all the freaking time until you just wanna tear out your eyeballs and stuff them into your ears? HOW COME SAILOR MARS, MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER, DIDN'T EVEN TRANSFORM IN THE SPECIAL, MOVIE LENGTH EPISODE!?!