Hey Moonies – it’s been a rough month for me (especially the last two weeks) and I’m personally apologizing for the lack of updates. I had to deal with a really bad car accident involving my family among other stresses. Things are starting to get better with that so I will be returning to update you all soon with what has been happening with Sailor Moon. I want to take this time to personally thank all of my friends and fans who have been supportive through this hard time – it really means a lot! I will have a few videos posted very soon of some TV appearances the VAs have done recently, so you can all look forward to that as well as a big summer exclusive! Until I get caught up though, we have a couple things to share with you all!

Firstly, our awesome site programmer and commercials editor, The Me, is having lots of fun with Dr. Mario Online Rx! This game is a part of Wii Ware, and can be purchased for 1000 points. Here we see his Miis dancing after beating the first level in Virus Buster mode. But wait, two of them have Tiaras?! You are not mistaken, those are Miis fashioned after Sailor Moon and Sailor Mars! To the left of Sailor Moon is everyone’s favorite tuxedoed hero, Mamoru, who is sporting the latest fashion in maskwear. Here’s a closeup of them!

Secondly: earlier we told you of some major convention news involving Mitsuishi Kotono, Keiko Han, Akira Kamiya, and Yasuo Yamaguchi appearing at Animazement 2008! Genvid has posted a video of a live dubbing of Sailor Moon which can be seen here, and A Fan’s View also covered the event. If any of our readers were lucky enough to attend the panel, we would love to hear your stories!

Letter Wins State Competition!

前略 – 草々武内直子:

寒い日が続いておりますが、いかがお過ごしですか。どこにいるの? 2008年に再びあなたに会うことを願っています。

敬具,
月追

Of course, we would like to write more to Naoko Takeuchi. In the United States, there is a competition known as “Letters About Literature”, where readers write a personal letter to an author, living or dead, from any genre. The readers then go on to explain how that author’s work changed their way of thinking about the world or themselves. One state winner, Ashley Crossman, wrote a very moving letter to Naoko Takeuchi. We think it would be great if in the case of those authors who are still living, if the Library of Congress would pay for these letters to be sent to them. Ashley, you now join the list of Moon Chase’s Special People for your letter and your unwavering spirit inspired by Chibi-Usa!

Sailor Moon in the Top 10?

We came across this very interesting article today. Two weeks ago, the Sailor Moon S and the SS movies scored at #9 and #10 in anime DVD sales in Malaysia. These titles have been out of print for a very long time anywhere outside of Japan, and we are wondering why those two titles are so popular, and why now of all times. If any of our Malaysian readers has an answer, we would love to hear it!

Things have been crazy the last few days here, and it wasn’t until late last night an idea came to me about what to do for the Special this year. Last year’s Special was very popular and it still continues to be one of the top articles people check out. This year, we present to you, All About Her Mother, or rather, Sailor Moon’s Mother, Naoko Takeuchi!

Naoko Takeuchi was born March 15th , 1966 in Kofu city, in Yamanashi Prefecture. Her parents are Kenji and Ikuko Takeuchi, and she has a younger brother named Shingo. She named Usagi’s family after her own! She is a Pisces and if you consider Chinese astrology, her birthday falls within the lunar month of the Rabbit! She enjoys figure skating, swimming, astronomy, physics, driving, and furniture. She has interests in otaku and their culture. She is also a big fan of a very old tennis manga, Smash wo Kimero! She also has three piercings in each ear, because she likes to wear pearls. She dreamed of having a Porsche one day, and now has one which she got when she made it big with Sailor Moon! She loves comics, anime, and special effects a lot. She admires Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author who is famous for his post war works, as well as his very individual brand of nationalism. He also committed Seppuku in 1970. The inspiration for the many characters named after gems in her manga came from her visits to the Yamanashi Gem Museum. Because she was also a chemist, she understood a lot of the gems and minerals she encountered as well as their achiral and chirality and therefore named the characters accordingly.

She attended North Kofu Municipal Junior High School and later First High School in Kofu (known as Kofu Ichi High School). In High School, she was a member of the Astronomy, Geology, Festival Planning, and Manga clubs. She was a VIP with the Festival Planning committee, and she designed a poster for a high festival which was hailed as work that was beyond the level of a high school student. Naoko could really draw in her teenage years! It was because of this poster that she was noticed by a lot of people, and this lead to her eventual signing with Kodansha. Her father, though weary of the Manga industry, suggested she go to University with a backup plan in mind in case her dreams of being a Mangaka didn’t work out. At 19, Naoko Takeuchi was pursuing chemistry at the Kyoritsu College of Pharmacy in the hopes of becoming a pharmacist, but was also drawing manga on the side. Her first title, Love Call, won her Kodansha’s Best New Artist award in September of 1986! She graduated in the late 80s from Kyoritsu, and her senior thesis dealt with the field of medical use of electrical engineering or more specifically, the ultrasound. Her thesis was probably titled (though she doesn’t quite remember) Heightened Effects of Thrombolytic Actions Due to Ultrasound.After she graduated, she worked in Internal Medicine at the Jikei University School of Medicine’s Teaching Hospital. This was located in Tokyo’s Minato Ward, where Sailor Moon took place! Naoko worked on a few smaller titles, The Cherry Project, Maria, and Chocolate Christmas, and began Code Name Sailor V in 1991. Sailor Moon made her debut in 1992, and was the one big break she had been hoping for. The Smash Hit won her Kodansha’s 17th shojo manga award in 1993, and the rest as we all know is history!She married Yoshihiro Togashi, another Mangaka in 1999, and in 2001, gave birth to a son whose name has never been disclosed, though he has been nicknamed Petit Ouji (Little Prince) and more recently, Junior.

We’re not entirely sure what she is up to right now. Last we heard, she gave a lecture to business in 2005 at Ritsumeikan University. In 2006, she said that both her and Yoshihiro had a few viral infections and told their fans to wash their hands and rinse out their mouths frequently. Naoko’s blog has been discontinued from the official Sailor Moon website, and we don’t think that she is working on the Sailor Moon website, or that she is still drawing manga. Yoshihiro hasn’t mentioned her in any of his little blurbs he writes when he publishes Hunter X Hunter.

Nonetheless, on this Mother’s Day 2008, we salute Naoko Takeuchi and everything that she has bought the world through her manga, anime, and live action ventures! In honor of her on this day, we’re now going to show you an old interview of hers we dug up from the glory days of Sailor Moon!

So – our poll results are in, and thanks to all 55 of you that voted! Seriously, we try to add polls to this site to add a bit of fun and we definitely know there’s more than 55 of you who read this site, so we encourage you all to vote! 61.8% of you voted that you’d go see a Sailor Moon movie with a darker perspective on the plot, just like the new Speed Racer Movie. 16.4% told us that while you thought the flashy effects were cool, you probably wouldn’t go see it, and 21.8% were undecided.

Speed Racer just opened last week in theaters, and so far it isn’t doing so well, raking in a disappointing 6.1 million on Friday. Nearly every review we have read has panned the flick, and we Moon Chase staffers aren’t planning on seeing it for now (though we may brave it for second run theaters). We weren’t too impressed with the first 8 minutes of the movie, and we thought it was a cross between Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and the popular F-Zero GX video game for the Nintendo Game Cube. We really don’t like the outside scenery at around the 3 minute mark – it looks too fake. We’re embedding the first 8 minutes below for you all to see. If any of our readers have gone to see it, we’d love to hear from you! Post a comment below!

This being said, this is only the first in many American adaptations of anime titles to live-action movies to come. Next up is Dragon Ball, and we’ve seen a lot of pictures from the set of this film and our expectations are continuously getting lowered. These blogs (link 1, link 2) are doing a very good job of covering the film’s production. We worry this Fox film won’t do the original anime much justice. Not too long ago, Dreamworks finally announced that they had gotten the rights to make a Ghost in the Shell 3-D Live Action movie. GiTS is one of our favorites here at Moon Chase, and just in case anyone from Dreamworks is reading this, PLEASE DON’T MESS THIS UP! Don’t follow the example of Speed Racer. Since Avi Arad is at the helm of this one, we have a lot more faith in him that he will make this one great – after all, his Iron Man is #1 for the second week in a row !

Publication Schedule Slightly Shuffled

Hey fans – upon the request of a fan who left a comment yesterday wondering when Mr. Naoko Takeuchi was going to resume his epic manga Hunter X Hunter, we thought this would be a good short article to try to find an answer too. The good news is, fans got a treat in last week’s issue of Jump magazine – Yoshihiro gave readers two chapters of the Chimera Ant story arc (chapters 22 +23) and they ended on a cliffhanger. From some of the reviews we have read, the fans are saying that this batch of comics since his return last March represent some of his best work in the series! At the end of the chapter, he writes to his fans saying that because he gave them two chapters, there will be no manga this week, but the next week (May 12th)will be the final chapter in this arc. Fair enough, 10 weeks of new chapters is 10 weeks, and at the very least, Yoshihiro has promised the fans that they will get their last chapter. As of this writing, we are unsure when the manga will return after this arc is completed.

We also got to see a note he wrote to fans at the very end of his comics for this issue! It seems Yoshihiro is on a diet now which requires him to walk 10,000 steps a day! He speaks of his son, Junior (but no word on what his real name is just yet). No mention of Naoko in this one :(. Yoshihiro just turned 42, and from all of us at Moon Chase, Happy Birthday! We are providing you all with the translation: