Welcome to my Sailor Moon pages. I have pages for different Sailor Moon topics. This page is a starting point to get to the other pages.
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George Brown College has Anime Vortex. Their web page has changed more than once and the current page is http://animevortex.engine.ca/. They don't show Sailor Moon anymore. Because you sit in a regular classroom the sightlines are poor. This club is good if you want to play video games because usually they set up a Japanese anime-based game for members to play.
University of Ryerson has URAnime showings about once a month. Their new web page is ur.anime.ca. Scheduling has been a problem since fall 1997. At least they adjust your membership to make up for the missed shows.
University of Toronto has UTARPA shows once a month. It is also a role playing club. Their web page is www.utarpa.org. They usually show titles you can get yourself from Suspect Video so there isn't much incentive to go except for the big screen.
University of Toronto also had Club Anime but Robert Wong the club president left town and shut down the club. Their web page www.interlog.com/~sasami/anime-club/ doesn't work anymore. I think they were the first to ask for a fee per show as well as a membership fee.
University of Toronto also had AnimeXtreme. On December 11, 1998 AnimeXtreme went out of business. There were maybe 100 attending the final show and a lot of people got free prizes. The best giveaways were the mini-CDs and I got one by Yuki Matsuura. We also got free pizza which I assumed was a way to empty the club's treasury. March 1999 the club started up again but was out of action as of January 2000. They started the club again September 2000. The big news is them moving to the Bloor Street movie theatre for twice-monthly Saturday afternoon shows in 2001. Their new web page is http://www.animextreme.ca. Price is now $7 per show. They opened a store in Chinatown in July 2002. Unfortunately the anime rentals are the second highest-priced in town. At $4.50 for a one-day rental they are only slightly better than Blockbuster which has a two-day rental at $4.99. Cybercity has $2.60 for three-days and Suspect has one-day for $2.82 rentals. These prices don't include federal and provincial taxes which would make the prices $5.18, $5.74, $3.00 and $3.25. Suspect has the additional complication of DVD rentals being $.50 higher priced and older stock being $.50 cheaper with a five-day period.
I should also mention the York Anime and Manga Association. They have a small tape library for club members. YAMA
Also University of Toronto at Mississauga Anime Club UTM
Sheesh! Can't a guy get a single day ticket for this thing? As of the year 2000 you could only get a three-day anime pass. For the comic book part of the show you can get a one-day ticket. There isn't much incentive for me to spend $40 just to see dealer tables since I already see a ton of anime at the clubs. If you want to meet the Sailor voices though then check it out the Canadian National Anime Expo web page to see if they will be there.
TOKYO- You may think, moms and dads of America, that the comings and goings of a 14-year-old Japanese eighth-grader named Usagi Tsukino have nothing at all to do with you. You may think that Usagi's loyal friends Ami and Rei, her kitten, Luna, and her golden-horned pet unicorn have no relationship to your life.
But if you think that, moms and dads, you're likely to be proven seriously wrong very soon.
As tens of millions of fervid young fans already know, Usagi Tsukino is the secret identity of the mighty female superhero Pretty Warrior Sailor Moon, a cartoon and comic-book star of immense popularity in Asia and much of Europe.
About six weeks from now, Sailor Moon and her all-girl squad of teen-age justice fighters will invade the American TV market with a Saturday morning cartoon show.
The predictable raft of Sailor Moon books, dolls, toys, T-shirts, toothbrushes and other tie-ins will follow, with the first shiploads of licensed goods appearing in U.S. stores well in time for Christmas.
They will be brought to you by the folks who turned the Power Rangers into a $400 million-per-year retail phenomenon: Bandai Corp., Japan's biggest toy maker.
"We think, said Bandai president Makoto Yamashina, "that Sailor Moon can be as important in the lives of American girls as the Power Rangers are for boys.
America's major toy retailers, from national giant Toys R Us to the local mom and pop stores, seem to agree, given initial orders for merchandise.
In Japan, at least, the eighth-grade adventurer long ago passed her male rivals in the teeny-bopper superhero trade. Sailor Moon TV shows, books and movies in Japan draw much bigger audiences than the King Rangers, the current Japanese version of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers show. Sailor Moon toys bring in more than $250 million per year in Japan, Bandai says, five times the level of Power Ranger sales.
The promoters of Sailor Moon think it's all about gender. The long-legged teen-ager who comes from the imagination of female comic artist Naoko Takeuchi, 27 is the first female to become a cartoon superhero in her own right, in contrast to, say, Supergirl or the female Morphin Rangers, who were copied from male stars.
"In Japan and all over the world, women are assuming more and more positions of power in society, Yamashina said. "They don't want to be discriminated against as soft or gentle; they want to grow up to be tough and forceful. And Sailor Moon is a role model for that type of girl.
Copyright 1995, The Detroit News
by Liam Lacey
Film Critic
HERE'S Ginger Spice, the one who looks like a Pekingese and makes jokes about her big breasts (Geri Halliwell); there's Baby Spice (Emma Bunton), who wears pig-tails and cuddles her stuffed toys; there's Scary Spice (Melanie Brown), who has a bolt through her tongue and gives herself Star Wars hairdos; there's Sporty Spice (Melanie Chisholm), who wears Adidas and does cartwheels and, according to the fan gossip, is the only one who can really sing. Finally, there's Posh Spice Victoria Adams), who has a kind of Tuesday Weld/Wednesday Addams preppie-Goth appeal and is rumoured to be really a man in drag.
Together, these five are the denizens of Spice World, a quick-paced, Crayola-colourful movie that's best enjoyed in a theatre full of screaming adolescent and pre-adolescent girls, the core of the Spice army. How good. is the movie? Who cares? Spice World is critic-proof, devoid of plot or acting, and quick to mock anyone who might make something of it.
Newspaper people are defined as evil: Australian comedian Barry Humphries (best known as Dame Edna) plays the twisted tabloid mogul out to wreck the Spice Girls with his evil squads of paparazzi. Intellectuals are idiots, as we see with Alan Cummings as the documentary filmmaker desperately trying to get behind the "show-business facade" of the Spice Girls. Two Hollywood hacks (George Wendt and Mark McKinney) keep offering the Spice Girls better plots for their movie. But the girls are too busy having fun.
BRITISH celebrities seemed to have lined up for the chance to have walk-on parts, proving that all of England, is behind Spicemania. Sir Elton John, recent keyboard eulogist to Princess Diana, lays his kiss of benediction on the Spice Girls in the opening scene. In another scene, Sir Bob. Geldof gets his hair done by Scary Spice. Jennifer Saunders, star of the series Absolutely Fabulous, compares fashion notes with Posh Spice. Elvis Costello, who appears as a servile bartender, offers himself as an example of the fickleness of pop fame. In a nightmare sequence, Stephen Fry, in a magistrate's wig, judges the Spice Girls' latest single insufficiently phat and funky.
Right now, the Spice Girls are being called the biggest pop act out of England since the Beatles (a title previously held, if memory serves, by Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood). Like a lot of pop, the Spice phenomenon is Iargely about adolescent marketing - the girls offer a homogenized combination of the American rap trio Salt-N-Pepa's working-class raunch with the cartoon dress-up fun of Sailor Moon. It is also relatively clever - directed by Bob Spiers of Absolutely Fabulous fame as a series of sketches, and centred by a wild-eyed manic performance from Richard E. Grant (Withnail and I) as the band's neurotic manager.
As is the case with Titanic, the spectacle is more important than the script here. The girls rehearse and perform in push-up bras and platform shoes; they go to Italy and watch muscle men flash their derrieres; meet some aliens who want tickets to their show. They improvise before the camera, exchange behind-the-scenes scripted banter, race about London like madcap-silent comedians, and worry about arriving at Albert Hall for a big show they have to do.
If it all sounds somehow familiar, it should. One of the working titles of the new movie was It's Been a Hard 15 Minutes, a combination of Richard Lester's Beatle pic A Hard Day's Night with Andy Warhol's quip about everyone being famous for 15 minutes. Most of the plot elements of A Hard Day's Night have been simply retrofitted to make Spice World. The Beatles' train has become a Union Jack-decorated double-decker bus, and Paul's wandering grandfather has been replaced by the Spice Girls' pregnant friend, who keeps threatening to pop a baby.
There's one telling difference. Near the end of Spice World, all five girls wander off in a sulk and disappear before a big performance. In A Hard Day's Night, just Ringo wandered off in a sulk, but this update makes some sense. Compared to the Beatles, all five of the Spice Girls really are most like Ringo (whom Village Voice critic Robert Christgau once described as "our representative on The Beatles"). These are distinctly average-talented birds, who, like Cinderella, have been magically elevated to stardom and in the process have given their fans a world of gaudy, happy fantasy to enjoy.
My seven-year-old daughter, who watched the scream-filled preview of the movie in awe, looked at me during the closing credits and announced: "I didn't like this movie. I LOVED it!"
I thought that was cute, until she told me on the way home that she planned to dye her hair blond and make it as straight and pretty as Posh Spice's.
Globe and Mail
Friday, January 23, 1998
The Japanese have a long tradition of story telling with pictures using the traditional art of wood block prints. When American newspaper comic strips were imported into Japan at the turn of the century, Japanese from all walks of life embraced this new medium.
There are manga for every age group, covering every genre of life and fantasy, drawn in an incredible range of visual diversity. Proof of manga's huge popularity is in the numbers - over 2 billion manga produced each year.
The exhibition contains 144 drawings, in colour and black and white, by some of the leading manga artists in Japan. Included are early heroes and heroines created by the legends of Japanese manga as well as the fantastic realms that appear in today's magazines.
Now for my comments. I went to this show and was disappointed that they weren't displaying original art. Can you imagine an exhibition of copies? I noticed their web page had disclaimers about not copying their images. Ironic yes?
Here is a Sailor Moon window display at the Bay, a large Canadian department store chain at their store on Yonge and Queen in downtown Toronto. This photo was taken December 1996 I think. You can see two Sailor Moon doll houses and the two sizes of action dolls. They have their own web site at Hudson's Bay Co. but I don't think you can get toys from them by mail. Someone said they saw an actress dressed up as Sailor Moon for one day as part of the Christmas promotion.
This 'zine called "Bigger Than Your Robot" is published by a local person named Jason. Issue 6 dated October 1996 has articles that might interest anime fans:
You can try to e-mail him at winnie@innuendo.tlug.org to buy or trade another zine for a copy. It is only a couple of dollars. These were available in 1997.
Here is a picture I took of someone dressed as Sailor Saturn from the Anime North convention 1997. I forgot to ask her name.
There were lots of Sailor Moon fans at the convention. My guess is that 150-200 showed up for the panel discussion on Sailor Moon. Earlier on about 75 crammed into the secondary viewing room to watch SM videos. Because it was a regular room instead of a theatre it was hard for me to see the subtitles on the screen.
I went in 1997 and 1998 but stopped as of 1999 because the admission price shot up. I already go to a lot of club showings and I shop at the local anime stores so there isn't much reason to pay $40 just to hang around. For some reason it is no cheaper to go to this fan-run convention than the commercial ones like CNAnime.
Jim's Millennium Moon Windsor for Sailor Moon collectibles
Millennium Moon Online Store for Visa credit card orders has shut down.
Babelfish Translations Altavista
AniPike The Anime Web Turnpike
Richard Iwasa's Canadian Anime Shopping Guide
