Sailor Moon-Volume 2: Sailor Scouts to the Rescue (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Main Menu Audio & Animation DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	130:47 (Case: 135)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (61:09)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Junichi Sato
Studio Distributor	Toei Animation Madman Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Click
RPI	$24.95	Music	Bob Summers

    This is the second volume of the first series of Sailor Moon. I'm not going over the basics of Sailor Moon again - I recommend you read my review of Sailor Moon Volume 1: a Heroine is Chosen first.

    The episodes on this disc are:

1. An Uncharmed Life - good luck charms that aren't
2. Nightmare in Dreamland - the girls visit a Disneyland-like theme park that's a giant trap for the Sailor Scouts
3. Cruise Blues - Jeddite gets help from another demon - she suggests a romantic cruise ship as an energy tap
4. Fight to the Finish - Jeddite's last chance - he must destroy the Sailor Scouts or else...
5. Match Point for Sailor Moon - some people get awfully worked up over tennis
6. An Unnatural Phenomena - nature turning against developers

    Now we meet Sailor Mars. In Roman mythology, Mars was the god of War and that's not inappropriate here - Sailor Mars is much more aggressive than Sailor Moon or Sailor Mercury, and she has a potent flame attack. She's also skilled in martial arts and magic (her magic is an interesting Japanese form, involving Kanji characters written on slips of paper). She's quite an addition to the Sailor Scout team. I found it interesting that her Sailor Scout uniform includes shoes (I think they're court shoes) rather than the boots that Sailor Moon and Sailor Mercury wear.

    Unfortunately, her aggression isn't limited to her Sailor Scout battles. She and Serena lock horns frequently over a number of subjects, including boys (and that includes Tuxedo Mask!). This makes for some interesting interaction - Sailor Mercury never challenged Sailor Moon like this. Strangely, Serena doesn't seem to act quite as responsibly now - she bursts into tears more, and resists doing her duty more, too. Maybe that's a temporary thing.

    The morals of the episodes on this disc involve some big issues including recycling and pollution, as well as resisting the urge to settle for less than the best, and the value of teamwork. I'm surprised how nicely the morals are presented (American shows are usually incompetent at presenting morals).

    Sailor Moon is good harmless fun. It's not sickly sweet, and adults can enjoy watching it with children. You could do far worse in choosing entertainment for your children (or yourself!)

Video

    The DVD is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and is not 16x9 enhanced. That's the original aspect ratio, as is appropriate for a TV series that was made in Japan in 1992 (the 1995 copyright is for the English adaptation).

    The picture is a touch sharper than Volume 1. There's no low level noise.

    Colour is bright and colourful, and fully saturated, which is good to see. There's no oversaturation, and only a moment or two of very minor colour bleed (actually, it could be part of the original artwork).

    Strangely, the breaks where commercials were inserted are noticeably longer on this disc. One of them (61:09) is so long I thought it was the layer change. It's not a big problem, but it is strange that they are so much more noticeable on this disc than on the first. I hope this isn't the case on later discs.

    There are fewer small film artefacts than on Volume 1, which is nice, but unfortunately there are other artefacts which look like various type of tape errors or MPEG coding problems. Look at 33:18 (some kind of analogue tape error), 33:28 and 48:09 (a few lines are blurred/missing/repeated). There's a strange kind of macro pixelization around 73:32-73:33 - it looks like a ripple moving down the screen. Even with these artefacts the show is still quite watchable - I'm just pointing out the technical flaws in the disc.

    There are no subtitles. (The anime purists will hate that!)

    The disc is single sided and RSDL-formatted. The layer change is at 65:23, between the third and fourth episodes (there are three episodes on each layer). It's a quick layer change, and well-placed.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is only one soundtrack, in English (The anime purists will hate that too - they want the original Japanese sound as well as, or even instead of, the English version). The soundtrack is Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, and it sounds mono. There are no audio artefacts on this disc.

    The dialogue is clear and readily understood. There are moments when the English voice acting doesn't match the mouth movements perfectly, but it's not enough to be truly annoying.

    The English title music is credited to Bob Summers. It's bouncy, perky stuff.

    The soundtrack makes absolutely no use of your surrounds or subwoofer.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There are no extras.

Menu

    The menu is lightly animated with background music. It offers a choice of which episode to start at - when you select an episode it starts playing there, but it continues through the remaining episodes.

    There's not a lot to choose between the Region 1 and Region 4 versions of this DVD; both are dub-only and extra-free. The R4 is slightly cheaper, but that's about it.

    Six more entertaining episodes - good fun. Not a fabulous DVD, though.

    The video quality is far from perfect, but it won't interfere with watching the show.

    The audio quality is good.

    Don't bother looking for the extras - there're aren't any.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall