Sailor Moon's Lost American Pilot Has Finally Been Found
That's right, a very ingenious YouTube reporter has finally uncovered Saban and ToonMakers' legendary lost Sailor Moon pilot in full after all these years! One of the most legendary projects among anime fans was a Sailor Moon that was intended to become an "Americanized" version of Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon series. Unlike the original English dubbed adaptation from DiC, a pilot was created for a half live-action, half-animated program that was going to bring the characters from that series into a whole new kind of world for American audiences. But it never got beyond the pilot stages.
Although a pilot for this new series was produced in full, it was lost to time as the only real way fans in the current age had seen it was a camera recording of the pilot footage during a convention decades ago. This left lots of questions about the project unanswered until Ray Mona on YouTube (real name Raven Simone) uncovered the lost pilot through months of digging into those tied closely with the production. You can check out the pilot along with the work that went into discovering it below from Ray Mona's YouTube channel, it's the second part of a much larger documentary that fans definitely need to check out to get the full picture from:
As part of Raven Simone's Tales of the Lost series in which she takes deep dives and searches for lost media projects (which previously saw the reporter finding a scrapped Mean Girls game for the Nintendo DS), the two-part documentary for the lost "Saban Moon" pilot saw her contacting and hunting down nearly everyone involved with the production of the pilot. The full pilot itself along with the music video for the series' theme were not only discovered in the collections of the Library of Congress, but the dig itself is even more interesting than the lost footage.
The ToonMakers developed Sailor Moon project would have been a huge detour from the original series with completely new character names, arsenal, and a new live-action setting that would have seen the Sailor Scouts balancing their school lives with their lives as heroes. You should check out the full documentary (with the first part starting here) for the full rundown of how Simone discovered this long lost project.
How do you like Sailor Moon's American pilot? Do you think it would have had a chance at huge success? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!