I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

Saturday, August 30, 2003

There's another article in The Gazette of interest to me, an article, written by Tony Atherton of the Ottawa Citizen, about Toronto actress Samantha Bee becoming a correspondant on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Not that I watch The Daily Show (it's become too liberal since George W. Bush got into office... well, it went left about the same time Dennis Miller went right), just... there is a section in the middle of the article that, obviously, is very much of interest to me.

"Acting hadn't been Bee's first passion. She had drifted a bit after high school, taking classes in math and science at McGill before switching to U of O, intent on getting a BA in English before law school. A second-year drama elective changed her life.

"It was such a great department and I enjoyed the class so much that I switched over two years into my program," she says." It was the best teaching that I could have ever received because we learned how to respect other people's craft within the larger framework of the profession."

Her degree, however, did not quite prepare her for years of hand-to-mouth existence as she pursued her craft, sometimes in strange places. The low point, she says, was playing Sailor Moon in a live-action CNE show based on the Japanese cartoon. At least it was an acting job, which were as few as one a year during the first half of her career."

(N.B. CNE = Canadian National Exhibition a.k.a. "The Ex"; the largest fair in Canada, held every year in Toronto.)

What-what-what-what? Dressing up as Sailor Moon was her "low point"? Is "low point" actress-speak for "the coolest thing I ever did"? As part of this show, did an actress dress up as Sailor Mars, by any chance, and, if so, would she still have her Sailor Mars costume, and, if so, can I please have her phone number?

By the way, please don't confuse Samantha Bee with the helium-voiced Stephanie Beard a.k.a. "Sugar" a.k.a. "Suga Baby", host of The Zone on YTV and some Toronto radio programme as well as being the English-dubbed voice of Reeny/Rini (Chibi-Usa) on Sailor Moon S and Sailor Moon Super S, the third and fourth series.

Well, since I am, in a way, talking about live-action Sailor Moon (and, for those of you who found this page on Google looking for info on the new Japanese live-action Sailor Moon series, scroll down a bit... I talked about that this week too and gave some good links), here's a flashback to what might have been had Saban gotten the North American rights to the property instead of DiC. (And here's a follow-up article on the same site.) And this is the page with the actual video of a screening of the clip from a Los Angeles comic convention in 1995. I can take a black Sailor Senshi/Soldier/Scout just fine, but in a wheelchair? What, did Queen Beryl install a wheelchair ramp? And... in the American-animated segment... are they fighting a bear? Huh? Well, you know, what DiC did to Sailor Moon was in no way perfect (though I firmly believe they did what they had to do to get it onto North American TV in the anime-on-TV-unfriendly environment of 1995), but... be thankful that they used the original animation, at least.