15 years ago today, on March 7th 1992, the first episode of Sailor Moon, “Crybaby Usagi’s Magnificent Transformation”, aired for the first time in Japan. The series spanned 200 episodes until it’s finale on February 8th 1997. It also spawned 3 theatrical movies, 2 specials, musicals, videos games and an immense assortment of merchandise.

Sailor Moon was based on a Manga series by the same name which began appearing in Nakayoshi in December 1991, 4 months before the premiere of the show, and ran for 52 acts over a span of 5 years.

At its prime Sailor Moon saw great success worldwide as it was broadcast and published in nearly every country in the world. In the mid 90s you’d be hard pressed to go very far without seing some sort of Sailor Moon merchandise. It was likely the most internationally widespread franchise of it’s time. Sailor Moon herself is one of the most popular fictional characters ever, up there with such greats as Santa Claus, Superman and Jesus.

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JJ Abrams, mastermind of the WB classic “Felicity,” is officially on board for the next Star Trek movie as director, and Paramount has announced that it will shoot this fall for a Christmas Day 2008 release. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Alias, The Island, Transformers) will write the screenplay. You can see the full press release here.

So thats the official line. What of the rumor mill? Cinematical has some reports on casting that sound kind of… suspect. When the word first went around of a series reboot, we heard stuff like Kirk & Spock in the Academy and young Star Trek. A prequel, like Muppet Babies. Now some names are flying around and depending on who you ask, they’re close to signing or already cast. But some of these actors are a bit older, so maybe the prequel thing is out the window. So who is who?

• Matt Damon as James T Kirk. I just watched The Departed last night looking for Kirk and I think he can do it. Damon is one of the best, and the only thing he’ll do that Shatner didn’t is give a performance without camp.
• Adrien Brody as Mister Spock. Another great actor, an Academy Award winner at that. The hardest part about Vulcans is taking them seriously with those ears, especially for someone so well known already.
• Danel Dae Kim as Hikaru Sulu. He’s best known as Jin Kwon on LOST, but also has some experience on Trek. He played Corporal Chang in 3 episodes of Enterprise!
• Gary Sinise as Dr Leonard McCoy. I can think of few others more suited toward the role as the incredulous ship’s doctor. He comes on board much older than the rest of the crew, and certainly older than Deforest Kelly in the original series.

It remains to be seen how this will pan out, but Star Trek definitely needs some help now or this franchise will die.

Lets start this off with some good news on a freebie: Game|Life reports that the first ever release of a high-definition episode of South Park will hit Xbox Live Marketplace. Starting Tuesday March 6, the Season 8 classic “Good Times With Weapons” will be available to Gold members for no cost for 2 weeks. Those without Xbox 360 or Live can still get the episode: On March 20 Best Buy is giving an HD-DVD for free with the purchase of any Xbox HD DVD player or a 360.

Personally, I grabbed Alien Hominid and Ms Pac-Man on Live Arcade this week. Alien Hominid is about the hardest game I’ve ever played on XBLA, and includes a boss event I cannot pass because I have no idea what to shoot. Ms Pac-Man I cleared all 200 Achievement points in under 2 hours. Go figure. Worms HD finally drops next week for another 800 points ($10), but I’ll pass until I actually finish Alien Hominid.

Tekken finally made it to the North American Playstation Network. Which is pretty good if you have a 1080p TV, don’t own the PS2 or the PSP versions. Nah, its budget priced and worth your dollar to get it in the prettiest format available. I understand you can buy Jin a new hat in this one. The much hyped Warhawk sequel from Sony has been downgraded from a full game to a Multiplayer-only download title. Well at least they won’t charge you an arm and a leg for it now.

The best game on the download circuit this week has to go to the best game ever made, The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. Nearly a decade after release, its still got the highest rating of any game released before or since. $10 is a hefty sum on Wii‘s Virtual Console, but considering how vast the game is, its a bargain. Nintendo obviously knows how awesome this is, as its been released on the GameCube twice, but if you missed those or (god forbid) the N64 original, now is the time.

I’ve never considered myself a Trekkie, only because a Trekkie would chuckle at my lack of basic knowledge of Starfleet. I am a casual fan though, and so I’m able to quite enjoy former Star Trek: The Next Generation star Wil Wheaton’s look back at the show.

Wheaton’s talks enthusiastically about his part on the show as an actor and also as a fan of Star Trek. He’s also pretty frank about being disliked by Trekkies, and slyly points out how corny the macguffins in the ST:TNG were.

Read on for Wil’s thoughts on Fairpoint, Ferengi, and sexy time on the Tsiolkovsky.

Newsarama has a note up saying that Jim Samples, the head executive officer at Cartoon Network resigned on Friday due to fall out from the guerilla marketing campaign gone wrong in Boston for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. In an internal memo to the company, Samples stated that he hoped his resignation would allow this event to be put in the past and allow the company to move forward. The article goes on to say that he had been with the company for 13 years.

You can read the rest of the internal memo in the article here.

Speaking as a Bostonian, this is another footnote in an embarassing chapter of history for the city of Boston.

A skillfully done video edit, if I may say so. National Lampoon, which hasn’t been funny since Chevy Chase was, is apparently responsible.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s probably is as bad as you’ve heard. If you’ve watched it, you probably didn’t see much or any of the fourth season. That’s a shame, because that’s when the show actually got good.

Both Star Treks Voyager and Enterprise are the brainchild of Brannon Braga, a scriptwriter-turned-producer from the days of Next Generation. His signature trademark consists of stories based on strange temporal/spatial anomolies, hence their preponderance in Voyager (and indeed the premise of the entire show), and the ill-advised Temporal Cold War that consumed Star Trek: Enterprise from the inside out.

The beginning of the fourth season saw Braga replaced by Manny Coto, who put an end to this horrible storyline. What followed were several three-episode arcs dealing with Trek history. From Kahn-like genetically-enhanced humans, to the history of Surak and Vulcan, and an explanation for the Frito-Lay (i.e. “ridgeless”) Klingons of Kirk’s era, this season fulfilled the inherent promise and potential of the series after three grueling years.

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The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commision has approved a request by YTV to have an anime themed channel in Canada. The target of the channel would be 18+ which is a change considering YTV stands for “Youth Television”.

A lot of numbers are thrown around in this broadcasting decision which serve only to confuse people but so much to say the channel will have to be exclusively anime and anime related shows. I suppose it remains to be seen exactly what the CRTC counts as anime. Interest in a similar French channel was mentioned though no details are included. As YTV does not have a French equivalent these requests likely came from elsewhere.

Still far too early to talk about when this may happen or what cable packages will offer it but this is promising for Canadian anime fans who are unable to watch many anime programs broadcast on US exclusive stations such as Cartoon Network. Equivalent Canadian channels such as Teletoon play a fraction of these shows often months to years later.

Of course the reason we can’t just watch Cartoon Network in the first place is because of the CRTC but hey just for today let’s be glad they’ve done something good for a change.

Thanks to Cybersnark for pointing out this post with the news.