Yes, I know we are behind...

Hey readers - sorry for continuing to delay my posts. There are a few waiting to be written however there is too much going on behind the scenes. Flashpoint summaries will probably be posted by the end of this week, along with ratings details. There's been a few other stories relating to Sailor Moon in the news in Japan as well as North America. I'll be taking the rest of the month off once those are done and I won't return until 2nd week of February . However, The Me will be handling things for a while, and he will do his best to keep this blog updated! Thanks to all our readers for their patience!

Tabitha's Mystery!

Hey Moonies! Tabitha is a friend of mine (who actually knows me away from the internets!) who sent me scans of a really old Sailor Moon flyer. She is wondering what the wands are that Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus are holding (and she doesn't recognize them from the Sailor V manga). Us members on staff can't quite remember what they are either though these pictures do seem a little familiar. If any of our readers know what these are, please post in the comments - we'd love to know! In any case, enjoy these scans of a Japanese Sailor Moon flyer!

Flashpoint Reminder!

Hey Moonies! Just a reminder that Flashpoint is returning to both CTV and CBS this Friday, January 9th - please watch it and continue to give Stephanie Morgenstern (Sailor Venus #1) and her husband Mark Ellis your support! These episodes are really amazing, and we encourage all our readers to catch them on TV - we will be! The first of the four "lost episodes" from Season 1 begins this week, and the new episodes begin on February 6th. All we know is that there is a new female member named Donna who will present quite the challenge to the SRU. CBS has posted a new promotional interview with show star Enrico Colantoni (Sgt. Greg Parker) and this interview is playable (unlike some clips on CBS's site) in Canada! We have also uncovered an older interview of Enrico along with co-star David Paetkau (Sgt. Sam Braddock). And as always, our summaries will return shortly after the show airs!

In other fantastic Flashpoint news, the show has finally been nominated for it's first of what we hope will be many awards! The Canadian Film and Television Association announced its nominations for the 2009 CFTPA Indie Awards, and Flashpoint is nominated for Best Prime Time Drama Series and faces competition from ReGenesis, Intelligence, and The Border. We wish the best of luck for Flashpoint and we really hope that it wins! Other productions which VAs have made appearances were nominated - The Border featured two VAs, Intelligence has featured Sabrina Grdevich in the past, Little Mosque on the Prairie which has featured not one, not two, but three VAs in its run, and Mayerthorpe which starred Wendy Lyon (Queen Serenity) in a supporting role.

BREAKING NEWS: Two Lost Souls Have Returned!

In the last few days, two very important people involved with Sailor Moon have finally returned to our radar!

Sailor Moon R II: The Promise of Naoko

Forgive us for the Sailor Moon Return pun :p. For the last few years, pretty much the only news we had heard of Princess Naoko came from people who had been around her, from students in 2004, to more recently, Naoko's own husband. On New Years' Day of this year, it looks like Princess Naoko's Room has returned in a much different form to the official Sailor Moon Website. And, we were lucky enough to get a picture of Naoko (even if it is from last October). In Shizuoka City, lies Bandai's Hobby Center, which is their main toy factory. The toy factory has a showroom, and also aspires to be the first green toy factory with zero emissions, and wants to be a pioneer in plastics recycling. Naoko visited the Bandai Hobby Center in October, and had the opportunity to check out some Gundam plastic models (known as "Gunpura") and has joined the ranks of other mangaka in drawing their characters in a Gundam style (it is Gundam's 30th anniversary after all!). Naoko says that this is a drawing of Usagi in a Hobby Center Uniform. The entry hints that there may be more updates from Naoko to come in 2009! To check out a full translation, go visit here! We are so happy to finally have a new picture and some words from Naoko in many years! Naoko, please continue to update your site - we miss you!

Rika Izumi Makes a New Splash!

Rika Izumi (otherwise known as Chisaki Hama) is well-known for playing Sailor Mercury in PGSM. After the show wrapped in 2004, she disappeared altogether, and castmates were rumored not to be allowed to talk about her on their blogs or post pictures. Last summer, she made her return modelling in magazines, and she even got a role in the movie Clearness playing the character Reiko. She appeared in 3 scenes in the film, the last of which we have pictured here for you with an arrow. The movie is a romance based on a keitai shosetsu (mobile phone novel), about love in the sex trade. More recently, she has appeared in a noodle commercial as the beautiful Kimono Girl of a lonely boy's dreams (played by SMAP's Masahiro Nakai). This morning, we read an article all about her "re-debut"! Rika confirms that she gave her school the priority after PGSM ended, and that she graduated with a literature degree from Meiji University in 2007. Shortly afterwards , she took up modeling again! She wants to do more acting, and she hopes to be able to express herself as sexy and as lovely as Marilyn Monroe did. She wants to costar with everyone that she can, and she is still good friends with her former costars of PGSM. The article makes special mention of her friendships with Keiko Kitagawa and Mew Azama (Sailors Mars and Jupiter). When she was ready to return to the entertainment business, she sent her own shots around to agencies before she was signed. The article also features a brand new photo shoot, along with a few shots from her noodle commercial. Click here to see! Fans can also go to A Fruitful Spring to check out her most recent magazine appearances!

Merry Christmas Moonies!

☃ Hey Moonies! We wanted to take this very quick opportunity in between our much needed holiday break to share are warmest wishes for the holiday season and the New Year to all our readers! As you can tell, we haven't updated during this holiday season, and we are pretty much going to hit the reboot button come January since it's becoming too much to bring everything we wanted to you all :(. We are currently working on better ways to solve this (such as, not letting my computers get trashed over and over!). We didn't get around to doing a Christmas special set of posts this year, but we'll link you to last year's!

♨ While we would have really appreciated some sun since it is colder than usual in our parts of the world this year, we got the biggest present already - and it's each and every one of you! Fans gave us a lot this year that we didn't expect - from announcements of our major news stories at cons, to links on other websites, to the several emails of how much you enjoyed reading our site. Every day that I check the stats I am always surprised to see where all our readers are coming from all over the world - it astounds me that Sailor Moon had such an international audience beyond what any of us ever knew and especially how much support there were for the stars! The day we hit 50,000 hits , we finally realized that we did actually have a place among all you fans which was something that we struggled with from day 1. We didn't know how this project was going to be received when I first planned it out with my staff and friends, and the support has been overwhelming. We thank all of you for that - this was a record year for the site and we owe it all to you!

Nonetheless, we know some of you are waiting to hear at least SOME NEWS...

☽ We have some very exclusive Alisa Durbrow (Kuroki Mio) news which has come to us all the way from her family in Japan (Domo Arigato Ed and Yukari Durbrow)! We were a little concerned when we didn't see any mention of Alisa on Junes Agency pages and thought she might have quit the entertainment industry altogether (though her blog still remained). Ed and Yukari told us that Alisa parted ways with her agency in September - she had been with them for 13 years and she wanted to "graduate" and look for an agency that she can do some more music with, among other ventures! In our last post about her, we featured some old songs of hers from when she was much younger (and way before her PGSM time) and we all agreed that she is multitalented - she can sing, act, and model! We were relieved to know that we have not seen the last of her, and ecstatic to learn that she is practicing with her band and getting better at playing her guitar! She is still getting some modeling jobs directly from stylists at magazines. Ed and Yuriko shared this with us too (and we quote): "She thanks very much the fans who supported her for a long time. She hopes to see them when she get a new agency some day." We look forward to seeing you too Alisa and we really hope to hear more about your band some day!

☽ While Toei's OnDemand service in North America still doesn't have as many series as any of us wanted to see, their Japanese counterpart AniBB, continues to do well. On December 17th, they added a new plan allowing for unlimited views a month for ¥ 998 (about $11.04 USD) , and they have thrown the first month in this plan for free! Toei, we really want to see Sailor Moon here in the new year. Please bring it back to North America in 2009! Speaking of Sailor Moon, the "lost" season (Sailor Stars) made it's way into the article Top Five Things Anime Companies Did Wrong in 2008 under incomplete releases. And we have to agree with every one of their points.

☽ And we have a couple video links for you! CBS has done a really good job with their promotion for Flashpoint which will be returning in January, and Sailor Moon fan CloverPhuu has made a wonderful AMV of Usagi/Serena and Mamoru/Darien to Amy Jo Johnson's Dancing in Between which was used at the end of the episode Attention Shoppers. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Re: BIG BIG Flashpoint Roundup!

Flashpoint Predictably Returns to Canadian Television on January 9th!

As we reported last week, CBS announced Flashpoint would return to the airwaves on January 9th. It took what seemed like forever for CTV to announce that they were going to follow suit . More importantly, it seems like Stephanie Morgenstern (Sailor Venus #1) and Mark Ellis barely got a break - because new episodes are going to air immediately after the last four from last season air! Seriously, if we lived in Toronto, we'd visit the set and bring the cast and crew pizza, hot chocolate, and home-baked Christmas cookies as a token of appreciation for their hard work! Enrico Colantoni, who plays Sargent Gregory Parker on the show, had a few positive comments to say about the rise in popularity of Canadian TV shows on US networks. We encourage every reader of this blog in North America to tune in when the show returns - once again, you will not be disappointed with these new episodes! In fact, one of our last posts just below this one has a spoiler from one of our readers in New Zealand, where TVNZ aired the first season in entirety!

And just for you Amy Jo Johnson fans, she had a baby girl! Little Francesca Christine was born on December 1st, weighing 7 lbs, 1 oz. Her middle name honors Amy's mother, who tragically passed away in 1998 of uterine cancer, just as she was about to make another big acting milestone in Felicity. Amy wrote a very touching tribute to her mother in Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul: on Tough Stuff which we recommend all of you read if you haven't already. She was already a star before she entered in this world, as Flashpoint was shot during Amy's pregnancy! On behalf of all the readers of Moon Chase, we congratulate Amy and her fiance Oliver Giner on the arrival of their new bundle of joy!

BIG BIG Flashpoint Roundup!

☃ ☾ Hey Lunarians! ☽ Expect updates to be sporadic for the next couple weeks, it's getting very busy behind the scenes! But we just had to update you all on Stephanie Morgenstern ♀ (Sailor Venus #1) ♀ and Mark Ellis' Flashpoint! Tangentially, I have discovered new ASCII codes and am having way too much fun with them tonight... you may want to increase your browser's text size to see full detail! ☃

BREAKING NEWS: Flashpoint Returns Much Earlier Than We Expected!

Many industry insiders since we wrote our last article had predicted that Flashpoint would return sometime in February occupying the slot once held by the now canceled The Ex-List (of which the latter we predicted not too long ago). Today, CBS announced that it would return on January 9th, on Fridays at 9 P.M. in that timeslot that we had predicted! Venusians will just have to wait until a little after Christmas to catch the new episodes. As of this writing, CTV has not announced an airdate, however we would not be surprised if a press release from CTV ended up in our inbox tomorrow morning. We predict that they will air it at the same time (yay for "Reverse Simulcast"!) We here behind the scenes have managed to see the unaired episodes and we loved them so much that we are going to tune in when they air on television - and we encourage all our readers to do the same and to please support the show just the same as you did this past Summer and Fall! We really love these next episodes - and we'll tease you a little bit. Ed Lane grips with balancing his work, old ghosts, and family life, OMG THERE ARE BOMBS COMING AND YOU GET TO SEE SPIKE WORK, and umm... Sam and Jules. Not saying any more about those two! Tune in to find out more! A VA will appear on the show in one of these episodes - Robert Bockstael (Prince Diamond from the R-Season). Stephanie also makes a brief appearance as well. We look forward to seeing more of these stories come to life, and hopefully more VAs appearing on the show! We've got our fingers crossed in the hopes that Terri Hawkes (Sailor Moon #2) might appear somewhere on the show.

A Spoiler and a Flashbit!

We ran across a couple items in the news in the past week!

☀ Series Writer and Co-executive Producer Tassie Cameron remarked at a recent conference, "Basically, they asked us to make 13 pilots." This explains why the cops on the show didn't have many arcs that carried on from episode to episode. There was a short bit with Greg Parker and his son, the last few episodes get heavy dealing with Ed Lane and his family, and Sam and Jules get a little more involved towards the end of the season. It seems that this season , there is going to be a lot more with the characters and their continuity beyond the length they had in the first season. We learned of a casting call for a female actress! The role of Donna Hewson calls for a character who "is a 'triple A' Alpha female -- strong, outspoken, funny, compelling, complicated." "In her first episode, we see this tornado of a woman blowing past most of her male competition -- nailing every physical, shooting and combat test, impressing Ed and the rest of the team in an intense recruitment drive." She will appear in the first 4-6 episodes of the season, and we are guessing this is to accommodate Amy Jo Johnson's maternity leave (and we haven't heard if she has had the baby yet, Power Ranger fans). We're excited to see where this goes this coming February! Again, we will not post our new episodessummaries until they air on North American televisions.

☀ And one of the most completely random articles we caught on our radar has to do with the supplier of the training and the non-lethal weapons used on the set! Lamperd Less Lethal, a company specializing in less-lethal weaponry announced a few days ago that they once again had an agreement providing training and less lethal weapons to Flashpoint Season 2! Jim Bremner is serving as a consultant on the show, and he has posted a few pics behind the scenes of Flashpoint along with some testimonials from the cast!