A teenage girl who'd rather sleep than save the world somehow becomes the reason you believe in saving it. The monster-of-the-week formula gets repetitive early, but by season two the show stops treating Usagi's growth as a joke and starts treating it as the whole point. By the end, you're not watching a magical girl beat demons, you're watching five ordinary girls become the people they had to become, and that shift from comedy to consequence rewires what the show was about the entire time.

An ordinary girl named Usagi stumbles into an extraordinary destiny when she rescues a cat with a crescent moon on its forehead and learns she's been chosen as Sailor Moon, a magical guardian sworn to protect Earth. Armed with a transformation brooch and newfound powers, Usagi must fight monsters that steal human energy, sent by the sinister Queen Beryl of the Dark Kingdom. The problem: Usagi is a crybaby and a klutz who keeps getting poor marks on her tests, and learning to use her powers is hard enough on its own. Her mission also means finding the other Sailor Guardians, the missing princess of the Moon Kingdom and the Legendary Silver Crystal, all needed to keep the planet from being destroyed. Blending action, fantasy and romance, this is classic magical girl storytelling.