What I think of Sailormoon...
1. The dub was horrid
2. The original wasn't the best thing ever and was repetitve (not nearly as much as most children's shows at the time, like DBZ for instance)
3. The manga author was a universalist (believing that all religions are right), if I remember correctly... Yeah, that makes spiritual things confusing in the show (no more than Star Wars, I suppose)
4. Look at my avatar, for crying out loud, it obviously holds a place in my heart...
Sailor Moon was the anime that got me re into Anime... My first anime that I knew was anime was one of the ones on Sci-fi channel that was about robots killing people because people were polluters... Something stupid like that... In any case, I occasionally caught anime on TV until my friends got the Columbia house anime collection (one a month) and got Project A-ko and Akira... I loved Project A-ko, but I decided to watch Akira, and it nearly scared me off from anime alltogether...
I watched some stuff with them after that, but I was really into emulators at the time, and I just downloaded whatever games, and found one called "Sailormoon: Another Story" It wasn't translated yet, but I had my friend come over, who was obsessed with SM (which I called "Power Rangers for girls) and refused to touch before that) and explained all the characters to me and I got interested... We watched a bunch he taped (end of season 1 and beginning of R, the DiC versions, of course) and I was hooked...
It was Sailormoon that caused my interest in Anime to really take off. We bought the doom tree arc (the DiC version) and found something called "The Sailormoon Channel" online, which had SM episodes available for download in realplayer format, 56k... I only paid attention to the Dubs, of course (Japanese sounded so funny to me, I couldn't get through an episode of something in Japanese without breaking out in fits of laughter) I found out through S.O.S (save our Sailors, see I got into the show just as it was taken off Network TV and made only Cable) that the show had been drastically altered from the original, and The Sailormoon channel had subtitled episodes that weren't readable, but i knew they were out there somewhere...
I searched stores and the internet, never able to find anything about it... There was no subtitled version of the show online in readable form, but I eventually learned about something called fansubs... I found a fansub distroer (named Glen Pearce) and bought tapes off him... Got season 1 and 2 up to the death of rubeus in RAW japanese (and printed out summaries of all the episodes to read along with the eps) and got the end of R and all of S in subtitles...
I loved it... Every single minute of it.
And my parents never really knew what it was about, because you can be sure the stuff like the star and crystals and stuff wouldn't have flied with them... Not to mention the barbie doll nudity and two certain outer senshi...
BTW, I grew to hate DiC, but it could have been worse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1JmUcC9rssI've moved on since then, but it still holds a place in my heart... I'll still watch ep 45 and 46 from time to time... I haven't seen anything past that for a LONG time.