Sailor Moon-Volume 3: The Man in the Tuxedo Mask (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 (65:23)	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 third 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:

13. Wedding Day Blues - everyone's trying to make a prize-winning wedding dress
14. Shutter Bugged - a prize-winning photographer's model shoot isn't going normally
15. Dangerous Dollies - Serena's younger brother and one of his school-friends fall out
16. Who is that Masked Man? - Molly is accused of being Sailor Moon
17. An Animated Mess - Sailor V's animators get too involved in their work
18. Worth a Princess's Ransom - have the Sailor Scouts finally got a lead on the Moon Princess?

    This volume is called The Man in the Tuxedo Mask, and that's appropriate. Tuxedo Mask gets a lot of screen time in these episodes, and we start to learn more about him, including who he is when he's not Tuxedo Mask. We also get some hints as to the direction the series is going. There's not a single wasted episode here - each one takes us a step along the way.

    There's one questionable bit of plot in Shutter Bugged - supposedly, moths ate Serena's swim suit. Given that virtually all swim suits are made from synthetic materials (nylon, lycra, or something like that), this seems rather unlikely - I wonder if the writer of that line was male?

    I find it amusing to analyse the names of minions in Queen Beryl's kingdom. I thought Zeolite was questionable, but now we meet Malachite - that's just too unlikely... The mineral malachite is green. Beryl takes on a variety of colours, but the most precious is green - you may have heard of green beryl by its common name of emerald? Once I noticed this I started checking the names of Queen Beryl's other minions. There's no mineral called Jeddite, but there is jadeite - it's one of the two forms of jade, and green in colour. I also couldn't find a mineral called Neflite - perhaps that's a Japanese pronunciation of nephrite? And nephrite is the other form of jade, also green. Hmm, fascinating. It looks like Queen Beryl doesn't have min-ions as much as min-erals. (Ed. Groan...)

    The morals of the episodes on this disc get a little repetitive - the first two hammer home the idea of looking deeper than superficial appearances - "beauty is more than skin deep". It's interesting to note that the second-last episode emphasises not cheating, given that Rei was guilty of cheating in the previous volume.

    Sailor Moon is healthy fun - although the demons get vanquished, it happens in a rainbow of sparkles, not something gory or nasty.

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 about as sharp as Volume 2. Shadow detail is irrelevant to anime. There's no low level noise.

    Colour is a tiny bit muted on this volume, but only a tiny bit. There's no colour bleed or oversaturation.

    The breaks where commercials were inserted are still a bit longer than you might like, but most of them are less noticeable than on Volume 2. I have no idea what happened to that disc.

    There are more small film artefacts (spots, flecks, hairs) on this disc than on Volume 2, which is a shame. There are some noticeably larger ones, too, including a large black cut at 4:40, white scratches across three frames at 73:25 and white flaws for two frames at 82:28. There's a few examples of telecine wobble, too. There's some aliasing, but it is fairly minor. There's very little background shimmer, and no noticeable moire. This is not a perfect transfer, but is acceptable.

    There are no subtitles.

    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 well-placed and virtually unnoticeable.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There is only one soundtrack on this disc; English Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, and it sounds mono. There are no audio artefacts on this disc.

    The dialogue is clear and comprehensible. Occasionally there's voice without mouth movement, but it's not especially noticeable.

    The English title music is credited to Bob Summers. I've listened to it more than 36 times in the last couple of days, and I don't hate it yet - it can't be bad!

    You'll get nothing from your surrounds or subwoofer with this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no extras.

Menu

    The menu is lightly animated (a scrolling background) with 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.

    The R1 and R4 versions of this disc offer the same features. Nothing to pick between them, really, except that ours is PAL, and theirs is NTSC.

    Six more episodes which develop the longer-term story of Sailor Moon. Not a fabulous DVD.

    The video quality is flawed, but you can watch it.

    The audio quality is fine.

    There are no extras on this disc.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall