Vietnamese Sailormoon
The following information has been submitted by Lina.
"In one page you mentioned somebody named Jennifer told you about Sailor Moon
in Viet Nam that it was not that famous. Well, i lived in Viet Nam for most
of my childhood and i can assure that Sailor Moon was big among junior high
students, just like all Japanese comics are over there. Sailor Moon arrived
in Viet Nam as black and white anime books, which contain, as you may knew,
black and white screenshots from the anime. The pictures were in poor
quality, neither anime-lookalike nor manga-lookalike, and i have the
impression that they, the people from the Vietnamese publisher, are traced
from the original anime screenshots, which is why they looked so ugly. But
the book covers were in color and very neat indeed. There were also Sailor
Moon calendars published by the same book publisher. There was a lot of
editting, most references to bi-sexual/lesbian relationships were left out.
Sometimes when it gets to the point where editting didn't help, they just
simply cut off the part and moved on to the next, leaving readers all
puzzled. It happened a lot and it got worst in the Sailor Moon Super series.
There was no Stars series in Viet Nam, not that i know of. Perhaps the whole
transsexual/crossdressing sailors thing is pretty obvious and apparently
can't be cut without spoiling the storyline (just for the record, i like the
anime version of the Starlights: male in earth forms and female in sailor
forms, you may disagree but that's okay ;)
"As for the anime, subtitled version of the Japanese
anime is available in VHS and VCD. The tapes don't
come in order. I didn't buy any tape or VCD so i don't
know if the Stars series is released or not. The
Vietnamese National Television used to show the
original Japanese anime on every Sunday afternoon. It
was labeled as a children show. As far as i recall,
most episodes didn't appear in original order, A LOT
of episodes were skipped, i think for the same reason
that they did in the comic books. No "blurring effect"
is added, nudity-implied lines are not deleted, like
they are in North America version. It was on for a
while and then just suddenly went off the air. It is
difficult to say where it stopped since, like i said,
the series was aired in fragments with no logical
order whatsover. It was not dubbed nor subtitled. I
don't know what you call it since i have never seen
this kind of presentation on American television. As
the original Japanese episode was played, a Vietnamese
speaker (off screen of course) reads the dialogues
between characters whenever they speak. There is only
one person doing all the dialogues. As you watch, you
can hear both Japanese and Vietnamese, but the
Japanese is turned down a bit so the viewers can hear
the Vietnamese better. A little more info on this type
of presentation, it is popular on Vietnamese
television when it comes to foreign-language-speaking
shows. There was a reason for this. First off,
Vietnamese television viewers hate reading subtitle,
and due to the nature of the Vietnamese language,
sometimes when the characters say many words in their
languages (especially if it was Western languages),
they are reduced into just a few words when translated
into Vietnamese, and vice versa. Thus, when they are
dubbed in Vietnamese, the moving of their lips doesn't
match the words. This is common but Vietnamese viewers
can't stand that. Therefore the off-screen-speaker
method is preferred."
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