Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

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Akage
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by Akage »

In my local market (San Francisco Bay Area), the dubbed Sailor Moon was shown from 2:30-3pm M-F. Most elementary school children did not get out of school until 3pm.
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by DKop »

I remember it being on at 6 or 630 in the mornings on WB in syndication for a while back in 2001. I think it worked since Cartoon Network was still running Sailor Moon on Toonami and there was a Toonami type program block on the WB at one point, but either way both stations had some partnership to share each others shows.

I'm gonna strongly assume that Sailor Moon had success because it had merchandise on the shelves for kids to find them in retail stores and by them, and once tapes started to come out on shelves it was another medium to watch the series. Even if the kids couldn't watch what was on TV when school was being let out, they had a way to see it (although granted they had to pay for the tapes compared to just watching the show for free off TV).
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usamimi
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by usamimi »

...except the merchandise didn't initially sell well because kids didn't know what the characters were from (tv stations were originally showing it at 5 or 6 am back in the 90s....sometimes even 4 am from what friends have told me. :lol: ) Sailor Moon really didn't find monetary success until it became a cult classic AFTER its initial cancelation & Cartoon Network brought it back.

That being said, I'm sure a live action show like this would have likely been created with an after school or Saturday morning time slot in mind, but I could easily see it suffering from the same fate the original had to deal with. A lot of networks had no idea what to do with live action shows back then. I vaguely remember "Masked Rider" (aka the American attempt at localizing Kamen Rider like Power Rangers) getting shown at odd times because it didn't take off like Power Rangers did. So who knows? It's hard to say. I can't imagine it doing as well as DiC Sailor Moon, and even DiC Moon wasn't originally a success so.... xD
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by Drew_Sutton »

Fireminer wrote: Tue Sep 11, 2018 7:04 am Say, hypothetically, if this live-action show had been made, on which timeslots which it were likely to be aired? I did read a long time ago that there was a period which Sailor Moon were screwed by being shown on weekdays at the time children would had gone to school.
Akage wrote:In my local market (San Francisco Bay Area), the dubbed Sailor Moon was shown from 2:30-3pm M-F. Most elementary school children did not get out of school until 3pm.
usamimi wrote: (tv stations were originally showing it at 5 or 6 am back in the 90s....sometimes even 4 am from what friends have told me.
For us in Atlanta, it was 2:00 PM weekdays. My sister and I were able to catch a lot of it because we were out on summer vacation but we had two big trips that summer, so we missed several episodes. One of those trips was up to our grandparents, so we could find the TV guide and watch it there; I think in Detroit it was like 8:00 or 8:30 AM. When we went back to school, I would tape the re-runs so we could actually see most of (if not all) of the story.

This is the thing about syndication - a company produced a show and they would sell it to TV stations. These stations might have national network affiliation so they could get programming through their affiliation but even then, they might have gaps in their programming blocks, so they'll go to these other companies for individual shows. Since DIC or whomever was selling the original Sailor Moon dub would be selling to all of these different stations in different markets, the stations determined the programming block and time slots. So even if we had a show like this that was broadcast all over the country, it was often broadcast at different times all over, impacting the viewership. This is of course, contrasted with cable networks, where when they set the program time, that's when it plays for everyone*.

* Actually, I have a question about this for usamimi and Akage - I'm used to thinking of the Toonami block on Cartoon Network in the 90s/early 2000s as being from like 3 or 4 PM Eastern time until like 6 PM. On the West Coast, does that mean that Toonami was broadcast from Noon/1 PM until 3 PM, or does the cable system reset somewhere for Mountain and Pacific time zones? When I've been to SF and Seattle, if I watch TV at all, I usually tried to watch local TV networks (stuff that's harder to get back east) rather than cable stuff. But I also remember watching Futurama a couple of nights at like 11 PM in SF and was wondering why I never saw ads at home for it, when I realized at home it was 2 AM.
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DKop
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by DKop »

usamimi wrote: Sat Sep 22, 2018 4:20 am ...except the merchandise didn't initially sell well because kids didn't know what the characters were from (tv stations were originally showing it at 5 or 6 am back in the 90s....sometimes even 4 am from what friends have told me. :lol: ) Sailor Moon really didn't find monetary success until it became a cult classic AFTER its initial cancelation & Cartoon Network brought it back.
I know it aired on Saturday mornings either before or after the Kids WB block, and this was the mid-90's so I can assume that was the start of the show getting popular. If I saw it, other kids at my school did, and I know because we talked about it off and on. Granted I don't know how it was in the rest of the country, but that was how it was for me living in the Charlotte NC area at that time.
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Re: Chasing after the long-lost American Sailor Moon

Post by usamimi »

Sure, kids did see it. That's why it became a cult fave. But the initial merchandise release didn't make it hugely successful (altho I do have a couple of friends who actually discovered the show from the toy commercials). And obviously the low ratings lead to its initial cancelation.
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