I don’t think anybody was expecting it.
Lost media is just one of those things. Whether it’s due to licensing, or poor preservation, or God knows what else, it’s a constant worry to at least some. And it’s particularly pernicious with anime, as Kenny Lauderdale points out in one of his recent videos. But some of the more infamous examples are actually on the Western side of the anime equation; not because they were good, either, but because they did bizarre things with now-recognizable IPs. One such example is Doozy Bots, which was an attempt to bring SD Gundam Stateside (it will never not slay me that the wheelchair kid gets turned into a Guntank) and failed, leaving only a 4-minute pitch reel as confirmation it even existed. But the other would be Toonmakers Sailor Moon.
And, no, it wasn’t a dub or sub of the original Sailor Moon anime. It was a full-blown attempt to adapt the property with Western sensibilities in mind. As to why they’d bother Americanizing Sailor Moon, well, it’s likely they thought all the Japanese stuff in the original would be a bit confusing to the target audience. There’s also the fact that back in the 90’s, serialized storytelling was a rarity on American TV; but that’s all beside the point. Over the years, bits and pieces were found; the (Godawful) theme song being one of them. But it was known that there was a full pilot out there, somewhere. A 17-minute pilot that never saw the light of day thanks to DiC swooping in and simply licensing the original Japanese series out from under them. And regardless of what you might think of DiC’s version of the series, it can always be worse.
Flash forward to today, though, and it has been found. YouTuber Ray Mona put out a video regarding the subject of this lost pilot back in March 2022 (below). It’s a good watch, you should give her some of your time. Normally, that would be the end of it; one big documentary piecing together everything that could still be found, speculating on the bits and pieces, and maybe pushing the search further (but probably not).
But it didn’t stop there. See, the Library of Congress has, at least as far as anyone knows, a very extensive archive of things considered “lost”. You might think that means they’re not lost. You’d be wrong, though, because this isn’t just some archive you can go into on a whim. See, if you want to request material like, say, the pilot to a an unreleased American adaptation of the magical girl anime, you can’t just walk in there and ask for it. You need the copyright holder’s permission to do so; a wrinkle that’s easy to miss. Since things like this are typically part of the prep work for copyright, the Library of Congress receives it and keeps it, regardless of if the project falls through. Hence, there are things that are “lost”, even if they’re only just beyond your reach.
So, with the help of Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio, who also went on a journey to find this pilot, and the fact that some of the people that worked on the production, Ray Mona went on a journey to get ahold of this lost media holy grail. Eventually, she got all the way up to Bandai America president Frank Ward, who granted her permission to request the video from the Library of Congress.
And, while both of her videos are definitely worth watching, she’s also aware that some of you are just here for Godzilla, so she included the pilot separate of her documentary. While it’s not as long as it was thought to be at a little over 10 minutes, it is absolutely the thing for which people have been searching for over 20 years.
Yeah, one of them is in a wheelchair. Yeah, it’s unexplained. Yeah, she has a Professor X floating wheelchair. But look at it this way:
At least they didn’t turn her into some kind of robot that also didn’t have legs. Professor Doozy is still the height of unintentional American dickishness.
Source: AV Club
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