151 "Shin no Power Bakuhatsu! Ami Kokoro no Shirabe"
(True Power Explodes! Ami's Melody of the Heart)
144 "Heartfelt Melody" 00-10-27

Ami is intrigued by a melody she has found on a computer network. It is by an artist who will only list his initials. Ami contacts the composer telling him that she has written lyrics for his work. By a stroke of luck, Diana finds the person who composed the song and Ami and the others go to meet him. His name is Toshiyuki Nishino and he has been writing music with his girlfriend Kyoko. Ami feels that she has no right to write lyrics to a song that was made out of Kyoko and Toshiyuki's love. She runs out of the apartment and the other girls follow her. As soon as they leave, Ves-Ves appears and attacks Toshiyuki. Ami ends up by herself and Diana has to tell her about the trouble Toshiyuki is in. When she gets back, the others had already transformed and were fighting the lemures, Kero-Kero. Ves-Ves then proceeds to trap them inside of a computer. There, Ami has a vision of her and Sailor Mercury. The vision leads her to discover her new power, Mercury Aqua Rhapsody, which releases them from the computer. Sailor Moon then destroys the lemures and Ves-Ves flees. Toshiyuki is rescued and everything turns out alright in the end.

Well, this was the infamous "Ami is naked" episode. Yep, throughout Ami's "vision", she's naked the entire time. I knew that Cloverway couldn't keep it in, so I was quite prepared for a huge cut. What I wasn't prepared for were other things that they did which will be explained down below.

An episode I knew I would have fun with before even watching. They handled "Ami's Vision" scene just as I expected, so I wans't suprised there, but I wasn't expecting the things they screwed up. "Mecury STAR Power"?!?!?! Did they do this to make up for "Venus Crystal Power" in episode 92? Oy, and if not to end there, CWi took out the crystal henshins! Instead of "censoring" a new sequence, they just took the "*planet name* crystal power" then played the star henshin! Oy, I guess my day was going too good for it to have a good SMSS episode to play. Thats what I get for getting a PS2 on launch, a crappy SMSS episode aired.

The script for this episode was alright. Nothing important was changed, and if anything important was changed, it's listed below. Compared to yesterday's episode though, this script was a gift from God.

Toshiyuki Nishino's name is kept.

Toshiyuki's girlfriend, Kyoko, also retains her name.

The lemures, Kero-Kero, retains her name as well.

Now, during the first half of the episode, I noticed something. I noticed that my subtitled video and my taped dubbed video kept going out of sync. At first I just rubbed it off as Cloverway making small snipits here and there but there were two things that made me think otherwise.

1.) When a cut is made to the dub, the dub then JUMPS AHEAD of the sub (meaning my dub tape will be farther along in the scene/episode than the sub will be), but with this episode, my sub tape was actually jumping ahead of the dub.

2.) The "snipits" kept happening, meaning that my tapes were consistently falling out of sync throughout the entire first half of the episode even though I would adjust them so that they were in sync again.

Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The animation for the WHOLE first half of the episode had been SLIGHTLY slowed down. This was why my tapes weren't matching up. It didn't make sense to me though, why would Cloverway slow down all the animation before the commercial break? Then it hit me again. Since they had subsequently cut out so much from the second half of the episode, they had to make the first half longer to compensate. If they hadn't they wouldn't have a "Standard" episode.

All in all, I'm guessing about 7 - 10 seconds were added to the dub due to the slowing down of the animation. I'll let you guys get upset about this by yourself, since I'm still in shock over the discovery. Luckily, after the commercial break, the episode's animation synced up properly again.

(25 seconds) Well! Here it is! In Ami's "Vision", a total of 25 seconds were cut. This was any animation that showed Ami nude. They only shots they did show of Ami from this scene were if they did not reveal her breasts or butt, or if they were REALLY far away, so that nothing could be seen anyway.

In the "Ami's vision" scene, some shots from the beginning of the episode were added in so that the scene did not appear all TOO jumpy and so the dialogue could fit into the number of frames provided. Three seconds of animation were added to the scene so the net loss ended up being 22 seconds rather than 25 seconds, if that makes sense.....

Instead of saying "Mercury Crystal Power, Make Up!", the original henshin phrase, Ami says...

"Mercury Star Power!"

Now, I was expecting the omission of "Make Up!" but Mercury STAR power?? STAR!?! Oh no! We're not going back to that whole "Neptune/Uranus Star/Planet Power!" ordeal again are we??? We were doing so good for this season too! *CRY SOB*


Alright, THIS change made me very _VERY_ mad. During Ami's henshin into Sailor Mercury, they censored the part where Ami is naked. I know this doesn't make sense so I'll explain.

For the Crystal Power henshins, even though the movements are practically the same, the animation was re-drawn so that it looked sharper and neater. Now, you know the section of the henshin where the "body lines" appear, right? Cloverway has to cover those up...but they were too lazy to go and edit a WHOLE NEW henshin scene, so what did they do? The section of the henshin sequence with the body lines was REPLACED with the "Star Power" body lines section! I know this still might not make sense to some of you, so I'll spell it out for you.

In the original Crystal Power henshin, it goes like this...

1 - "*PLANET* Crystal Power, Make Up!" *show Crystal henshin stick*
2 - *Sailor twirls around with body lines as the henshin stick's 'magic' surrounds them*
3 - *Sailor appears fully clothed and does an ending pose*

So we have that down, right? Now, the first section, the "Make Up" part was kept the original along with the Sailor appearing fully clothed and posing part. It was the TWIRLING naked that was replaced.

This just angered me beyond belief. How _LAZY_ can you get?? The Crystal henshins looked SO NICE too! *sigh*

Mercury's attack, "Mercury Aqua Rhapsody", retains its name, but the deliverance for the attack was done wrong.

Originally, when the sign of Mercury appears on Mercury's hand is when Mercury should say "Mercury!" (wow, could I have said "Mercury" any more times??), then when she actually does the attack is when she should say "Aqua Rhapsody" resulting in a "Mercury!.........Aqua Rhapsody!"

Instead, Mercury said the whole thing during the attack so we get this ".............Mercury Aqua Rhapsody!"

Heh, when I first saw this I thought it was the end of the world, but compared to what's to come, this was NOTHING.

Total Retained 83%

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