The Sailormoon Story:
as interpreted by the Divine Saint Christopher.
A few years ago, a great and talented Japanese artist named Takeuchi Naoko designed a manga character known as SeraBuii (Sailor V), for a manga called Codename: Sailor V.

Sailor V was a blond-haired young teenager (named Aino Minako, whose written name can be loosely interpreted as Love's Gold Star) with a magic talking cat named Artemis. Her super-heroine outfit was a shorter version of her school fuku (see left).

Sailor V went around chasing guys and fighting evil, much like the first few adventures of Sailormoon.

 Now, Codename: Sailor V never gained much popularity, and finally Ms. Takeuchi came up with another character called Seramun (Sailormoon, duh). 
Sailormoon (whose name is Tsukino Usagi, or Bunny of the Moon) had a talking cat like Artemis, named Luna, who starts her out with the super-heroine gig and teaches her a few things. Along the way, she meets four other young teenage girls (all about 14 years of age) one of whom just happens to be the original Sailor V (now known as Aino Minako, Sailorvenus). For some strange reason (it was probably the extra characters but dont quote me on that) the Sailormoon manga (called Bishuojo Senshi Sailormoon) exploded with popularity and they made an Anime series based on it with the same name. They made three movies and a short feature. The series became a great hit and ran for five seasons in a prime time slot in japan.
Then the nightmare began.
 It caught the eye of the North American company DiC who bought rights for the show and created a lame english version, changing most of the character names (even changing the gender of Zoicite), fucking up the plot, while destroying the original personalities of the characters. They figured since it was a cartoon, it must be good for kids, so they marketed it and heavily pushed it on children, putting it in an early morning timeslot. Needless to say, the show was not successful in North America and they canceled it after the 65th episode, about halfway into the second season. Sailormon fans everywhere urged procuders to bring the show back on the air, but were unsuccessful. Finally the company USA bought the 65 episodes (only God knows why) and aired them in another early morning timeslot. DiC made 17 new episodes, shown in Canada but so far not shown in the US. To me, it does not matter, since the English version is extremely lame and is just a pathetic excuse for the original. For more information, check out the pages created by the Man Himself, Hitoshi Doi:Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon. For more details about how shitty the english dub is, go here.