Sailor Moon Musicals are difficult to recommend

At least difficult for me to decide which to recommend first.

I'm talking about the old run of Musicals from 1993-2005, those are retro and legendary as this piece of the franchise we Western fans knew little about for a long time but are now about as easy to watch as the show itself.  The new ones don't interest me as of yet and they're harder to find online anyway.

Usually when a fan decides to start checking out the Musicals they either start with the actual first Musical, which was an underwhelming prototype mostly, or they go right to the Last Dracul Musicals because as soon as we hear that exists we think "Sailor Moon vs Dracula as a Musical, how can I not start here".

Now I love the Last Dracul Musicals, they might just be my favorite single saga of the entire franchise.  But some people don't, I've listened to two Sailor Moon podcasts, Sailor Business and Love and Justice go on about how they hated it.  Maybe I'm just more into Sailor Moon going absolutely insane then the average American Moonie. 

But I also wonder if the problem here is partly the first Last Dracul Musical simply not being the best entry point to this particular version of Sailor Moon.  It is after all from what I can tell a much longer and more convoluted story then the prior Musicals, and it's sequels only escalated things further, because there is a lot more going on in this trilogy then just Sailor Moon vs Dracula.  

At first the Musicals were pretty much just glorified bonus episodes of the current/most recent season of the 90s Anime which occasionally reference Manga details, and that can be fun but what really makes these Musicals infamous is when they start doing their own thing.

Kaguya Shima Densetsu is the first Musical that is basically it's own original story with original antagonists, and it's a comparatively shorter musical compared to the Draculs.  So I figured that might be the perfect sweet spot, the ideal entry point.  But I just watched the Spring 1999 version and my feelings are mixed.

I mostly enjoyed the entire first half.  But then the fact that the Senshi are left unable to transform for much of the runtime starts making it drag.  This one also just didn't sell me on it's original characters as well as the Dracul saga did so I quickly got bored when the focus was on them.  Still the songs that are performed by the fully transformed Senshi were all bangers.

I'll check out more in the future and hopefully find a more ideal entry point.  There are also other versions of this Musical, maybe they somehow fixed my issues with it.  It'll take awhile to find out though, these aren't the kind of thing I can just spend all day watching, a good Musical kind of drains you, while a disappointing one makes you question why you liked the genre in the first place.