Venus Pink / Hikari --- Alannah Molloy
Venus Blue / Kiyomi --- Judith Lynn
Venus Red / Moyu --- Jody Lee
Venus Green / Ikumi --- Jen Alexander
Venus Purple / Ai --- Lisa Braverman

Necros --- Lauren Patrice
Duke Saturn --- Lance Cosgrove
Count Uranus --- Kevin Driscoll
Baron Pluto --- Roland Dehay
Viscount Neptune --- George Trahanis

Buccha --- Jack Altwarg
Aphrodite --- Nadine Hart
Ken Kanagawa --- Richard Nagel

Featuring:

Joan Gerardi
Socko Jones
Kip Kaplan

Original Author --- Jin Ara
Produced by --- Daiei CO, Ltd.

Storyline:

The evil Inma Empire seeks to revive the god Apollo. To do this, they have to revive him from centuries of sleep. Apollo would then bestow his great powers on whomever he saw first. In order to awaken the sleeping god, the Inma lord Necros sought the five warriors of Aphrodite, who oppose the Inma and their plans.

Characters:

The five Venus warriors each have special powers, and each oppose the Inma and their plans. They are each 19 years old and attend Golden Star University, which the Inma begin to use as a base.

There are few details on the characters. What I have gleaned from the first two episodes of the series is below:

Hikari - The main character. She is generally outgoing and self-confident. She has either blonde or sandy-blonde hair, with part of it arranged in two thick braids. She can get angry quickly, and when this happens, she is prone to swearing. She is opinionated and she does not hesitate to voice it.

Kiyomi - A shy girl, generally supportive of Hikari.

Moyu - Not much is known about Moyu, except that she seems to keep to herself. This is mistaken for smugness by Hikari when they first meet.

Ikumi - Ikumi was a member of a street gang before transfering to Golden Star University. While she is quite nice to her friends, she can be vicious to enemies. She often engages in unarmed combat with an attacker.

Ai - Not much is known about Ai. SHe is the only member of the Venus 5 whose secret identity is uncovered by the Inma.

Buccha - The cat advisor for the girls, who is often captured by the Inma.

General Remarks:

As you will see in later comments, a lot of things in Venus 5 may have been derived from Sailor Moon. This material saves the series. The hentai content is such that it would be classified as a low-grade hentai by the guidelines that I specified in my editorial exploring hentai. The material includes torture, rape, tentacle sex, and the idea that sexual emissions have special powers. This material degrades the series. The only thing that saves the series is the non-hentai materials, which contributes character development and plot elements.

Similarities to Sailor Moon:

The Venus 5 series is very similar to Sailor Moon. In fact, a person on the Internet who initially described the series to me said it was a hentai clone of the Sailor Moon series.

The transformation sequences from normal to heroic identities are very similar to those of the Sailors. Venus Blue and Sailor Mercury's transformations are virtually identical.

The characters are similar in other ways...

Sailor Moon / Venus Pink - Both characters' color is pink. Both have blonde hair, arranged in ponytails. Both are ditzy, although Venus Pink is a bit less so.

Sailor Mercury / Venus Blue - Both characters' color is blue. Both characters look alike. Both are shy. Both transformations look very similar.

Sailor Mars / Venus Red - Both characters' color is red. Both characters look alike. Both characters seem to be at least marginally disliked or mis-understood, at least at the beginning.

Sailor Jupiter / Venus Green - Both characters' color is green. Both are known for fighting. Both have strong attitudes and often engage in unarmed combat.

Sailor Saturn / Venus Purple - Both characters look nearly identical.

Other similarities include:

Both series feature cat guardians, although Buccha is less competant. Buccha is a derivitive of "Bacchus", who was the Roman equivalent of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Buccha may not be a drunkard, but he acts like one. He is continuously getting captured and torturned by the Inma, but he is good at enduring it. He is a bit of a pervert.

Both Serena and Hikari are introduced to their heroic identities in the same way. Buccha is being attacked by Inma demons and manages to elude them. He is wounded, and collapses near the tennis courts where Hikari and Kiyomi are playing. Like Serena, Hikari is astounded at finding a talking cat, she too believed she was seeing things. Both are untrained when their first confrontation with the badguys happens, and both end up in bad situations because of it.

The heroes of Sailor Moon and Venus 5 both have henshin items used in their transformations. In both sets of transformations, the planetary symbol of the character is used. In Venus 5, all of the women are represented by Venus, and therefore use the symbol for Venus.

Conclusion:

From the moment I saw the Anime 18 trailer describing anime, hentai, and Japanese culture, I have been interested in Venus 5. Anime 18 used Venus 5 as a backdrop for several portions of the trailer, and I was impressed with the series, and curious as to how close Venus 5 was to Sailor Moon.

As a hentai, Venus 5 fails miserably. This is because of the wierd things that Jin Ara included in the series, such as torture and tentacle sex. Villains can be sexual, without being perverted. As an anime series overall, the heroes not only save the day, they save the series. I find myself alot more drawn to these characters, and I find that I want to know more about them. I am not too interested in exploring the badguys.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at lunahq@yahoo.com and I will post your comments here as well.)