Gee, I wonder what this show’s about?
Quick! Name another anime besides Sailor Moon that began airing in 1992!
Pretty tough, huh? Well, that’s probably because out of the forty anime series to debut in 1992, only six of them lasted more than a year — many surviving only a few months.1
While we all know Sailor Moon today as a global phenomenon, it’s easy to forget that the series was by no means a guaranteed hit. In fact, many of the parties involved in the series’ creation were so caught off guard by its success that they didn’t even have products lined up to capitalize on it!
So how did Ms. Takeuchi and co. manage to draw so many fans to Sailor Moon? And, possibly even more importantly, how did the critics react to the series?
Today we’re going to travel back to late 1991 to see what the manga/anime landscape looked like through the eyes of a budding shojo fan. Spoiler: even before the series aired, people were making fun of Tuxedo Mask’s name!