Never to be seen in North America?
Last updated: 03/24/05
When ADV announced in the summer of 2002 that they had finally acquired the subtitle rights to the first and second series of Sailor Moon, fans rejoiced - finally, they'd be able to acquire R1 DVDs of Sailor Moon unedited, and the R1 world would finally know just what they were missing outside of Japan, including 5 episodes cut from the first season dub and one from the SailormoonR dub. The first boxset came out with the promised lack of edits. However, trouble had already started - the video quality was fairly poor for the series, and the audio in some episodes and sequences was unreasonably muffled. The answer ADV provided was that the masters they were given to work with were the ones they used, hence laying the blame at the feet of Toei. Still, the set was uncut, so despite the grumblings over the lack of care put into remastering the series, most fans figured they would deal with what they had and hope the Sailormoon R boxset would be better.
However, when the box art was released for this set, many fans noticed the absence of Episode 67 from the spine in the pictures, which led many to fear that the series would still be missing episodes despite the promise of being "uncut." At Shoujocon '03, ADV finally dropped the bomb - Episode 67 will not be included in the R1 release. The official statement was made at their panel by Matt Greenfield, who explained that the Japanese licensor for the series (Toei) had yanked the episode from the set, despite ADV's protest.
Needless to say, this led to a lot of bad feelings from the fan community towards ADV and Toei, depending on who was perceived as the responsible party. There has been no word from Toei except through ADV, who has been keeping contact with the Internet community on the Anime on DVD forums via David Williams, DVD Producer/ADR Director at ADV, who has offered a vague reason from Toei as to the reason for the exclusion of this episode:
| I honestly don't know the full reason but I've heard that the manga creator didn't like that ep. Beyond that I don't really know anything except I was told we couldn't put it on at the last moment. I was ready to hold back pressing that one disc if we could have worked it out but as I said, we can't. |
Since there is really no word from Toei as to why this episode is missing, there's really no other choice but to take ADV at their word. People following earlier DVD releases of Sailormoon will notice that Geneon's S and SuperS releases also had problems with missing footage, such as episode previews and not running the correct openings (they later included all three S openings as a bonus). In addition, DragonballZ, another Toei property, was also missing it's previews even when FUNimation released the uncut versions. The response from Funimation was that they were not given the footage and hence couldn't run it. As the Sailormoon Season 1 boxset was also missing next episode previews, the facts seem to lie on ADV's side, though mostly due to lack of evidence to the contrary from the Japanese side. Sadly, there is no way to know if the excuse that the creator (Takeuchi) hated the episode holds water because the Sailormoon R2 releases stopped after they released the first series. Though they have started up again, even if Episode 67 suddenly appears, the R1 release is almost two years old. It could easily be argued that Toei or Takeuchi changed their minds, Toei overruled Takeuchi, or that Toei, deliberately or not, passed along faulty information to ADV.
While Episode 67 is really a filler episode from R, this does not excuse the fact that it's exclusion leaves Sailormoon once more with missing footage that may never see the light of day. With the expiration of ADV's license for Sailormoon R, the chances of an official release of this episode grow even slimmer. The only option for those wishing to know what they are missing is this summary from Hitoshi Doi's website, or to attempt to find a fansubbed version of the episode.