I understand that this may seem petty, however, we've received the short end with our beloved franchise for far too long, and this is just the icing on that cake. 

If you agree with my argument, please, sign the petition, include your thoughts, and pass along to every friend and/or peer that you know is a Sailor Moon fan. We've put up with BS for far too long. We shouldn't be deprived of getting the very best just because we don't live in Japan. We can do this !

https://www.change.org/p/viz-media-postpone-future-releases-of-sailor-moon-in-the-countries-which-you-distribute-until-being-provided-with-toei-animation-s-legitimate-hd-remaster

I understand a lot of fans are unhappy with the quality of the Viz release and I can understand the reasons for it, but I seriously doubt an online petition is going to change much.  I mean, I can't think of any sort of instance in the history of anime where an online petition has had any influence on the release of an anime series.  There was just recently an online petition at Change.org to get Funimation to cancel their English dub of Free Eternal Summer because some Free fans were upset with some of the casting for the English dub, but as far as I'm aware, that online petition hasn't made any difference to the home video release of Free and Funimation is still going through with the current English voice casting, even though it has like over 5,000 signatures to it or something.  The best way to show your displeasure with Viz is to keep encouraging fans to contact Viz about your displeasure, and to vote with your money and not purchase the Viz set, and get a region free player and import the upcoming Australian DVD release that's supposed to use a different video master copy.  As long as the Viz Sailor Moon sets keep selling well, I doubt Viz will likely respond to the petition and all that will likely happen is that they'll probably just delete it from their email in-box section, as frustrating as that may be to the people supporting it.  Also, I'm sure Viz probably has some sort of contract requirements they have to go through with Toei and that just all of a sudden postponing the current home video release of Sailor Moon will likely be some sort of violation of their contract and could risk jeopardizing the future of Sailor Moon in North America if Viz upsets Toei by doing something like that.  Plus, given the way the R1 DVD release of Dragon Ball Z has been handled, I'm sure Toei probably wants America to have inferior video quality with our sets in order to prevent the Japanese fans from reverse importing cheaper American sets that have the same quality as the Japanese release.

I agree with Neon Genesis. A petition for something this relatively small trying to reach to various companies overseas isn't going to work. 
It's not like viz looks that bad, even.
Besides, Toei's remake looks less colorful and more bleached

I've heard about Madman putting their release on hold but they didn't mention anything about the Japanese Blu Ray having anything to do with the reason to the best of my knowledge.  This is the first I've heard about Viz putting their R boxset on hold and I've yet to hear any official announcement from them so I think it's a bit early to be making speculation about it.  They're still uploading the rest of the R season up on Hulu so we should at least wait until they're done with that to make any judgements about why they haven't released the release date for it.  If we're going to get two boxsets per year like we did with the first season, I imagine we'll probably get the first R set either by spring or the summer and the second half later in the year.  It's just too early to make any sort of wild speculation about this when we don't even know that Viz is delaying the release let alone why they are doing it if they really are.

There's a delay in release now? Great. 

Any website I can use to keep track on this, or am I just gonna have to rely on postings in this thread?

Only the Madman Australian DVD release has officially said they were delaying the release but they haven't given any reasons for it yet, only to say they weren't going to compromise on delivering a high quality release of the show.  I haven't heard anything official regarding the Viz releases as far I'm aware.

Ohhhh Ok. I thought this had to do with the Viz release. Sorry about that!

Despite the issues with Viz's release. I still think it looks great. It's an old show from the 90s that was made on a cheap budget. I'm sure other releases look better than Viz's, but you can't expect much from an older anime. I highly doubt they'll care about this petition. Most online petitions are ignored. 

Really there's a petition against the Free! English dub? Wow that's just sad and insulting to the voice actors.

Goddess Yami wrote:

Really there's a petition against the Free! English dub? Wow that's just sad and insulting to the voice actors.

Some Free yaoi fangirls who think Free is a shonen-ai anime when it isn't are upset that Vic Mignogna got casted for the role of Rin in the Funimation dub of Free Eternal Summer because Vic has a policy of not autographing non-canon slash fanart.  And to them that automatically makes Vic a homophobe or something, and therefore he should not be allowed to be in the dub of Free, even though Free is not even a BL show and you can just switch to the Japanese audio track if you really hate the dub.

Yeah it's just a slice of life show with hints of Yaoi. Kind of like K-on! XD

Goddess Yami wrote:

Despite the issues with Viz's release. I still think it looks great. It's an old show from the 90s that was made on a cheap budget. I'm sure other releases look better than Viz's, but you can't expect much from an older anime. I highly doubt they'll care about this petition. Most online petitions are ignored. 

I don't have a Blu Ray player so I don't have the Blu Ray version to say if it really is that bad but I have the Viz DVD release and the DVD release looks great to me and doesn't look much different from the R2 Japanese DVD releases.  The only problem I have with it is sometimes the colors are a bit over-saturated, specifically the color green for some reason, but you have that problem with remastered releases of older shows in general, like the remastered release of CCS.  I think some people are jumping the gun a bit here in trying to compare what is currently the only Blu Ray version of the show available to DVD releases from other countries and we should at least wait until the Japanese Blu Rays come out before we start bringing out the pitchforks at Viz as trying to compare Blu Rays to DVDs is like comparing apples to oranges.  We also don't know if it really was Viz's fault for the quality or if Toei gave them inferior master copies to prevent the Japanese fans from reverse importing the Viz release, which in that case there probably wouldn't be much that we can do about the state of the Viz sets.

Agreed. It never occurred to me that Japanese fans might import their anime. Honestly I don't blame them seeing how they're so expansive. If you aren't a die hard fan and don't want all the goodies then importing is the way to go. I still can't believe that people will play nearly 100 dollars for a disc that only has two episodes or four.

It's my understanding that DVD/Blu Ray rental stores are still popular in Japan and that's why they charge so much for anime home video releases because Japanese fans tend to rent more than buy.  Plus, they do have more access to watching it on TV than we do here in America.

And you can burn those rentals.

Neon Genesis wrote:

Goddess Yami wrote:

Really there's a petition against the Free! English dub? Wow that's just sad and insulting to the voice actors.

Some Free yaoi fangirls who think Free is a shonen-ai anime when it isn't are upset that Vic Mignogna got casted for the role of Rin in the Funimation dub of Free Eternal Summer because Vic has a policy of not autographing non-canon slash fanart.  And to them that automatically makes Vic a homophobe or something, and therefore he should not be allowed to be in the dub of Free, even though Free is not even a BL show and you can just switch to the Japanese audio track if you really hate the dub.

Wowwwwwww. So the guy doesn't want to autograph smut and you start a full blown petition against the full company in charge of the licensing in NA? 

See, its people like that that give anime fans a bad rep.

First of all, the petition had nothing to do with the new English dub. It was about the botched image. The dub is the only redeeming quality.

Second, Viz stated that the release span between Part 1 and 2 would determine the release span between each set. Part 2 was available for preorder before Part 1 was even released, and we have yet to receive a formal announcement regarding R Part 1. Madman stated that circumstances beyond their control were to blame for their releases being postponed, and the only thing that could hold them back is Toei. Charlene Ingram is going to Tokyo this week for "business meetings," and this is all coming together to well not to assume that they've been given the same hold order as Madman.

We know it has nothing to do with the dub. XD

Goddess Yami wrote:

We know it has nothing to do with the dub. XD

Misread your post. My bad.

According to the official Twitter channel for the Viz release of Sailor Moon, they've already started doing the voice recording for Sailor Pluto's dub voice which would be strange for them to be doing if Viz was really delaying the boxsets:  https://twitter.com/Sailor_Moon_NA/status/573948292385533952

I think they're actually about halfway done with R by now in therms of dubbing... And since they're already posting the cleaned up Japanese subbed episodes on Hulu, I don't think R season is delayed at all for Viz.

I bet part one of R will come out in the summer then part two in the fall.

That's what I'm thinking too.  And if they are going to follow a similar formula to how they released season one, people should remember they uploaded a sampling of the new dub to Hulu before they made any announcements on release dates for the home video release.  I hope they'll do a Moonlight Party for the R season too.  I've really enjoyed those, especially when they've had the English VAs involved with them, and they've been a lot of fun.  And I want to win a prize from them one day as I keep trying to win the trivia questions every time but it seems like each time the trivia keeps getting harder.

It wouldn't surprise me if we got a new sample of the dubbed anime by April or something.

The release schedule for the Hulu/Neon Alley streams shows them as going immediately right into the S season after they finish R instead of streaming the R movie.  I was hoping they would have the R movie on Hulu too, so are they not going to stream the movies or will they be released at a later time?  They mentioned doing dubbing for the R movie during the con where they made the recent announcement for the new R English VAs so I'm under the impression they're getting close to dubbing the R movie too, so I hope it'll be released soon after they're finished with the R season.

I bet they will do the movies all at once. InuYasha has a box set for the movies. So I bet Viz might do that too.

I guess we can pretty much rule out the Viz is delaying the boxset for the Blu Ray master copies from Japan conspiracy since they just announced the release date for the R season Part 1 today and it's coming out on July 14th.

Yeah, Toei's remaster doesn't look all that much better, aside from them redoing the text in the intro/outro. I've closed the petition and apologized to Viz.