Good News and Bad News: Sailor Moon DVDs and Socks in Mexico, New Toei Animation Series on Crunchyroll, and Farewell to Tokyopop

Mexican Sailor Moon fans are about to get a lot more Sailor Moon merchandise their way! Toei Animation Inc. announced some new Latin American deals for several of their properties. While there are no toys listed at this moment for Sailor Moon, there has been a licensing deal made with Doobalo S.a.de C.v. to make Sailor Moon socks. Does anyone else in North America feel like importing these and squeezing their feet into them to relive their childhoods? Also, thanks to facebook fan Jose Juan Hernandez for pointing us to this Sailor Moon teaser on Towers Entertainment’s website! The caption reads: "Coming Soon Special Edition on DVD Sailor Moon" Gotta love that brand new logo for the international revival. Speaking of new logos, Toei Animation Europe finally announced the return of Sailor Moon to Germany on their site, and posted one of our new favorite promotional images in the article which we have reposted above.

Toei Animation Inc. of Los Angeles launched three new series on Crunchyroll last week - Digimon Tamers, Interlude and Gaiking: Legend Of Daiku-Maryu. Free users will be able to watch 5 consecutive episodes of Digimon Tamers, and Gaiking: Legend of Daiku Maryu as they are posted each week, and one episode of Interlude per week until they are completed. All episodes are subtitled in English. It’s a little sad that the dub of Interlude is not up as it featured many stars of the English dub of Sailor Moon (and it was well done because Optimum Productions was not involved). Toei Animation has also launched the well-loved Toriko on Funimation.com and Hulu.

And on a sad note (but who didn’t see this one coming), Tokyopop announced last week that it was ending all publishing operations in North America. Though their translation and release of Sailor Moon was sub-par, we fans will always remember them for introducing us to the manga for the very first time. It is sad to see them go, but at the same time this day might not have come if they’d have improved their release quality.

BREAKING NEWS: DVD Releases for Brazil and Mexico!

Hey Moonies! The Sailor Moon Licensing News train is showing no signs of slowing down! A new press release confirms new Latin American licensing deals from Toei Animation Inc. of Los Angeles. Brazil's "little known" CD & DVD Factory as well as Mexico's Towers Entertainment are both set to release the series on DVD. As of this writing, there are no merchandise deals being announced, however if you are a fan of DragonBall and Saint Seiya, we recommend reading the rest of the release here if you would like to learn of DVD and merchandise releases in Latin America. Toei is also predicted to have a much higher annual dividend this year than originally forecast. Enhorabuena a Mexico y Brasil! Viva la Sailormoon!

BREAKING NEWS: Mexico and Latin America are NOT Getting a DVD Release

Yesterday one of our twitter followers Ultimo_Spalpeen tweeted this to us, and we were a little hesitant to post it to the site until we actually knew it was true. Roughly, this is what the Sailor Moon section of this article translates to:

Sailor Moon:

One of the most anticipated series in recent years, returns to Mexico and Latin America after many years, by DVD-release, or in this case, the DVD could not be censored but still contain the original dubbed track from Intertrack Mexico. In 2010, this is confirmed with a total DVD release.

We noticed that Capital 8 does have an image of Sailor Moon on their website, however it was missing the various copyrights or trademarks on it (on any of the Italian websites, there is always some mention of any combination of Toei, Naoko Takeuchi, and PNP). It is very difficult to find any official image like this on an official site without any sort of trademark/copyright information. And, there was no release anywhere on their site announcing that they had the rights to Sailor Moon. Moments ago, we just got the e-mail we were waiting for from our contact at Toei, and simply got the response back:

This is false information.

At this time, we wish to thank this representative for getting back to us so quickly today.

We understand that you are probably heartbroken with this bombshell, but please, do not give up hope Moonies in Mexico and Latin America! Perhaps Toei is waiting to see what kind of response the show will get in Europe before bringing it across the ocean.

EDIT: Toei has given another site some different information. The Latin America Sales Manager of Toei Animation Inc. Eduardo Lucio (who we can only guess works just feet away from our contact), has told SOS Brazil that Toei is waiting to see how the show does in Italy first, and then they hope to bring it back to Brazil in 2011. This is something that we had thought all along, and at least we know now that we are on the right track (although we thought we might have heard something by the Fall of 2010 considering how things have been progressing in Europe).