It was way back in April 2001 that ADV Films first revealed interest in bringing Sailor Moon to the DVD format. That July, in traditional ADV style, they prematurely claimed at AnimeExpo to have the subtitled rights to the first 2 seasons before negotiations had been completed. Perhaps caught up in a struggle with DiC over these rights, ADV went ahead and announced a dubbed-only DVD release in March of 2002. They acknowledged that subtitled rights were still in negotiation.

Now, a year and a quarter after that, the first subtitled DVD box set is slated for a July 15 release and is available for pre-order at online sites such as Amazon.com and The Right Stuf as well as the lower-cost BestPrices.com. This set is a collection of the entire first season of the original series, episodes 1-46, uncut in its original Japanese with English subtitles.

So, now you can deep-six those old fuzzy Japanglish bootlegs you got off the Internet and plug into the real deal! And get the DVDs while you can; we expect these to sell out quickly as ADV seems to be handling this as a very limited release.