
When Sailor Moon first came out in Japan in 1992, it changed anime—specifically magical girl anime—forever. The TV adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi’s manga, itself a spinoff of Codename Sailor V, mashed up the long-running genre with elements of sci-fi, superhero fiction, and the Super Sentai franchise. Where once magical girls mostly used their powers to solve basic problems—and occasionally cause them—the Sailor Guardians set a new standard for them as transforming, monster-fighting superheroes.