Hello my name is John and I'm a Moonie. I've been clean for eleven years now, but I can see that ending soon.
It all started when I was a young strip of a lad, barely thirteen years old, and still reeling from the discovery of series like Guyver and Devilman on the satellite-only TV station, Bravo. Certainly they both had a schlocky thrill for a newly pubescent boy but the then nascent internet provided a much richer idea of what was on offer from Japan.
An anime image site at that time was a rare and precious thing, not least because web space was measured in single digit megabytes and hosting archives of freely accessible images seemed unfathomably generous. The one I first spotted Sailor Moon on has long since succumbed to time and its name lost to memory, but it was the only title on there with a triple digit number of images.
Popular almost to a fault, it competed only with the juggernaut that is Dragon Ball and was distantly tailed by the endlessly angsty Angel Sanctuary so it was easy enough to find people, websites and hang-outs to feed this burgeoning obsession. In retrospect it's hard to say why I fell so easily into the abyss of tiaras and transformation sequences. Sailor Moon was not only a children's show but also squarely targeted at girls; what was a thirteen going on fourteen year old boy doing watching such a series? It could have been the little details like the wordplay of the characters' names or how each one had something as simple a birthday (Usagi, 30th June, blood type O) as well as likes and dislikes. Or it could have been that it was something different - the show having not graced UK shores at the time despite an English adaptation - and finding an accepting community in its fans. Or it could have been the broken cherry, the blood on the sheets, of a fixation with anime that would last a lifetime.
Regardless, a timely foreign holiday separated me from the internet (the horror!) but set my mind ablaze with possibilities. Website possibilities. Shortly after returning, Sailor Moon UK (SMUK) was born. Borne from a triumvirate of motivations: a campaign to bring the show to the UK, a way to try building a website (another obsession that I have since made a career of), and an outlet for all the useless trivia I had filled my head with.
Despite a brief letter writing campaign to different television broadcasters (only some of whom sent a polite letter of refusal back), the site was largely an attempt to put my mark on a fandom that already had hundreds of sites listed in The Anime Turnpike. The first and many subsequent versions were shockingly bad, taking close to five minutes to load on a then blisteringly fast 28.8 modem. I was a member of so many different Sailor Moon themed "rings" they were to eventually have their own page. My guestbook and counters were weighty reminders of its popularity. But the site introduced me to many people around the UK thanks to some well-placed letters to magazines, unashamedly hawking my still monstrous site.
More than just being an information dump though, the idea of bringing the series to the UK politicised what was originally a quirky obsession. Dic (the then distributors of the series) savagely cut and censored the ending of the first series? An outrage! No series past the second had been dubbed or released in English (probably) because of homosexual content? Scandalous! With a dearth of time and a spiralling phone bill it was easy to get indignant over any slight, perceived or commercial, against the franchise.
Several years into this lunacy and my once fervent desire to bring Sailor Moon to the UK had waned - SMUK was just a name now. It wasn't the only UK based Sailor Moon site but I liked to think it was the most well known. Part of the reason for this was I had found I could tune into a German dub of the show - uncut from the original Japanese version and already well past what was available in English. It didn't matter that frequent storms rendered the satellite signal sound-only or that a lot of the nuances of the show crushed my elementary grasp of the language, it was enough.
Coupled with several UK based importers providing Sailor Moon merchandise and a timely trip to the US providing me a copy of the luminous pink VHS of the (albeit incomplete) first series, I no longer had any vested interest in bringing the show to the UK. It was around this time, now well into the nineties, that I ran head-first into the cold, unforgiving embrace of Evangelion. The outer senshi and Sailor Mars' birthday (April 17th, blood type AB) had nothing on Jungian psychology and Christian symbolism.
Sailor Moon UK fell by the wayside and was eventually half-heartedly relaunched as the "Sailor Moon Sphere", and then bolted onto an Evangelion website. This despite almost buying a Sailor Moon related domain (a sizeable investment for a teen at the time) and spending countless hours siphoning video clips from many a site, including a music video set to Rage Against the Machine's "Know your enemy" and rare snippets of the original Japanese language version.
University and the general onset of life quelled the fires of my obsession despite a brief resurgence in 2001 when Sailor Moon S, the series that was never released in English, was released on DVD. Had I the foresight that it and SuperS, the black-sheep fourth series, would become rare collectors items on DVD, I would have perhaps purchased the latter when I had the chance.
Now though, on the series' 20th Anniversary, a new series has been announced. It's difficult to know how to take that news when magical girl series and anime as a whole has, for want of a better word, changed. Few series have matched Sailor Moon's appeal and worldwide reach, even genre behemoths like Nanoha or Cardcaptor Sakura, though popular still stand in its shadow. Recently Madoka distilled many of the magical girl elements to their purest form, skimming away the cruft and tropes, leaving what many people felt was a dark take on the genre. This overlooking the unremittingly bleak Sailor Moon S, or Sailor Moon Sailor Stars where (spoiler alert) the protagonist's future husband is dead for a large part of the series.
There are of course new champions for franchises aimed at children, the voluminous Pretty Cure an obvious example but even the "brony" subculture around the My Little Pony cartoon bears resemblance to Moonies of the past, though supercharged by the internet and, to a significant extent, 4chan.
Even with little else to go on other than a summer 2013 release date, news of the new series has anecdotally seen an uptick in Sailor Moon themed cosplay and fan-art so there is likely an existing (if ageing) fanbase for the new material. There is always a place for well-written series though and with the original author, Naoko Takeuchi, behind the new series there is a high likelihood that if it's not the figurative second coming of the magical girl genre (if such a thing were even needed or relevant), there will be a campy nostalgia for those old enough to remember the original series.
Bonus:
MoonieCode(1.10.12) <http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~crummy/index.htm> SM:5+m+ F:sSa>+Cc:vJj+:pCl* D:Ch<- X:a190r++|30d+:P1s O:d-s--o-a-h--- P:a15:s510:w-:f+:eBr:hBl-:t-:cWh:y--:r+|+