Q: What's the ado about this dub?

The Mexican dub of Sailor Moon was done by a company called Intertrack SA. de CV. This company has been known to dub more commercial anime like: Dragon Ball, Troublesome Witch Doremi, Dr. Slump (both the old and new series) Digimon, Card Captor Sakura and recently Tenchi Universe and Tenchi in Tokyo to name a few of their more known titles.

They generally have a very good dubbing quality reputation with the performance of top notch voice actors. Even in their most recent dub Doremi season 2 (which was dubbed to spanish around November 2004) they still dub the OP and ED songs to spanish.

The direction of Sailor Moon dub was done by Patricia Acevedo (or Paty Acevedo for short), who is also the voice actress of Sailor Moon herself.

Intertrack got the 5 seasons (except episode 89 because the episode lasted 45 minutes) and the 3 movies dubbed, with no censoring at all.

Q: Which station transmits this anime in Latin-America?

I don't have the information about this in other countries; but in Mexico, the show has been canceled long ago, around the year 1999. The show was always shown by a national TV station called TV Azteca. It's as if you watched this anime from a station like CBS if you live in the US, but without the censoring.
In the show's origins, they would put it weekdays between 3 and 4 PM and Saturdays around 11 AM.

Sadly, this station has the bad reputation of changing the schedule without any notice at all. Last Friday the show was at 3 pm and next Monday it was at 5 pm.
Later on, they got tired of putting the show on weekdays because they preferred to put shows like Candid Camera or Game shows, and left their hurt anime slot on weekends along with the Captain Tsubasa J anime for a while. If there was an important NFL game going on, it could pass months before you would see any anime again in this station. Their last positive move was when they showed the R movie in the station twice, and then canceled all of their anime.

Apparently, they got into a fight with the International foreign show transmission rights Syndicate, because they didn't promote the Sailor Moon toys well at all. This station is now banned from being able to get any new anime, but are still able to get new series shows and movies. The saddest part of this issue is that many anime fans who don't have the money to get cable TV still have the hope that the station will actually get any new anime. I really doubt it. Some of them even think they know which anime will be the next one to be premiered, but with National TV, unless the thing really happens, it's just rumors to try to spread empty hope.

Even today in January of 2005 the only anime they show is an old show called "Superlibro". In fact, in the year 2003 in honor of the 10th anniversary since the station was created, they published a book that talks about the hystory of the channel and some of their most important shows. The book mentions briefly the Simpsons, but it doesn't say anything regarding how anime helped them draw viewers. That is to show the lack of respect of this channel to Japanese animation.
They care more about dressing an 8 year old girl as a prostitute to sing for money (I swear they do this! Watch their show Aplauso Aplauso and see the horror for yourselves) than showing good quality shows. It's sickening.

Q: What did they do to the music?

All of the BGM music was left intact except the Opening and the Ending. They only dubbed the first two OP/ED songs: "Moonlight Denetsu" and "Heart Moving"(who were both sung by Paty). I currently don't have the ED in mp3, but you can hunt around in the net for it. I do have the OP in mp3 format and will eventually put it online.

They also dubbed to spanish the song: "Princess Serenity", you can hear it in the episode where Princess Serenity appears for the first time in the anime.

The songs are very well sung and the lyrics are extremly faithful to the original lyrics in Japanese.
However, the animation sequences for later OP's and ED's were usually replaced with the first OP and ED animation up until the ending of the S season. It's hard to explain unless I have images of the animation sequences which hopefully I'll try to get.

Luckily for the fan that was tired of seeing the same, in the SuperS and Stars seasons they used the first OP/ED animation sequences of those respective seasons. The SuperS ED used was one where Rini is looking at stores with Serena and the Stars ED used is a puzzle that slowly reveals it's Sailor Moon with angel wings. Even the SuperS and Stars OP/ED songs are the original 2 songs dubbed to spanish. The original OP of Stars (Makenai for example, was never dubbed to spanish and much less used as the song choice of the OP in the mexican dub).

This is the only really bad thing of the Intertrack dub in my opinion, because they left out many really cool OP and ED animation sequences and even worse, many very good songs (like Tuxedo Mirage for example

The reuse of the same songs and animation was sadly inevitable for the 3 movies. While they do use the original animation of the movie in the OP just gluing Moonlight Denetsu in spanish, things went different with the ED credits of each movie for the worse.

In the SuperS movie, they used Heart Moving with the original credits, but with the S and R movie, they glued in the animation of Heart Moving from the first TV series season, which made the ending result looking really bad.

I think because of this, many other dubbing studios have been much more careful with the OP's and ED's.
Audiomaster 3000 (the dubbing studio of anime like Lost Universe and Utena) only dubs the song if it's from a commercial anime or if it's a relatvely old dub before the popularization of just leaving the original song in japanese.

Most mexican dubbing studios today have stopped dubbing OP's and ED's alltogether because fans generally prefer the original OP and ED song in japanese. Most new dubs even contain every single OP and ED animaton sequence made. Mexican dubbing studios that do this are: Artspot (which dubbed to spanish anime like Burn Up! W, Saber Marionette J and Evangelion), Jesus Barrero's dubbing studio (Hell Teacher Nube, Gundam Wing and Yu Yu Hakusho) or Estudio Pegaso (The Vision of Escaflowne).

Curiously, most dubbing studios in South America still dub anime OP and ED songs to spanish, especially dub studios in Chile (Responsible for dubbing anime like Hunter x Hunter or Kaleido Star to spanish).

Q: Does any one of the actors from Sailor Moon participate in an anime available legally in the USA?

Even though none of the mexican voice cast that participated in Sailor Moon voice in english, you can indeed get to become familiar with the voices of a few actresses in the spanish track of the very few lucky anime that are included in the R1 DVD's sold in the USA thanks to ADVfilms and Geneon!!!

The following US anime dvd's not only include the mexican dub, but also the voice acting of a VA that participated in Sailor Moon:

Saber Marionette J
Panther -> Same VA (Belinda Martínez) that did Sailor Uranus. The acting during the moments when Panther was in a bad mood is very similar to Sailor Uranus's usual voice in the dub.
Cherry -> Same VA (Rocio Aguirre) that did Sailor Mercury. Cherry's more less comical moments had a voice extremly similar to Sailor Mercury's voice in the dub.
Lime -> Same VA (Christina Hernández) that did Sailor Chibi Moon. I personally don't think Lime's voice is that similar to Sailor Chibi Moon. For one, Christina never used Lime's cute laugh for Sailor Chibi Moon. Lime was always a very sweet character and the voice difference can be easily noticeable just because Christina needed to use a very snotty and bratty voice for Sailor Chibi Moon to make it sound more credible.

Burn Up! W and Excess
Rio -> Same VA (Rocio Aguirre) that did Sailor Mercury. However, Rio's really comical nature forced Rocio to use a far different tone of voice than the one used for Sailor Mercury. Rocio (who is the VA of Akane in Ranma 1/2) used a voice similar Akane's voice for Rio's character.

Those who hunt elves
Ritsuko -> Same VA (Christina Hernández) that did Sailor Chibi Moon. However, I personally think even though it is the same voice actress, the voice used for Ritsuko is far more grave and adult than the one used for Sailor Chibi Moon. Sailor Chibi Moon's voice was very high pitched.

Q: How come some of the characters have the same names from the DIC version for the US?

DIC got it's dubbing rights for Sailor Moon in 1995, Intertrack got them in 1996. Since DIC had rights over the anime in all of America, they made a deal with Intertrack (I don't know the complete details of why didn't Intertrack get the rights from TOEI instead, maybe they just wanted to save money in case the show was a flop), so that if they do indeed want to show Sailor Moon, they will have to use the same names from their version instead of the original names.

Intertrack accepted the deal. They were also limited to only being able to get 65 episodes. However (lucky for us), Intertrack didn't dub over the American dub with all of the scene cuts and much less jump episode. They got 65 episodes, but the exact first 65 episodes until the episode where Sailor Venus uses the Love Me Chain for the first time in the series.

The first pack of episodes ended until episode 65. The show was very successful and the fans demanded more episodes. Intertrack then dubbed the rest of SM R and the complete Sailor Moon S season around early 1997.
In the premiere run of the second batch of dubbed episodes, TV Azteca repeated the episodes once and premiered the entire SuperS and SM Stars season (including episode 200) in the third and final batch of dubbed episodes. They were premiered in mexico around the fall of 1997 just half a year after Stars finished running in Japan (which is very rare because an anime even today usually is dubbed to spanish 3-5 years after it premieres in Japan).

The curious thing about the dubbed episodes after episode 65 was that the rights for them were bought directly from TOEI (I think this is because DIC took too long to dub the last episodes of SM R and later on Cloverway to dub Sailor Moon S and SuperS).
Because of this, almost every new character that appeared in episode 66 till 200 (and the 3 movies) preserved their original japanese names. Some characters did suffer name changes but it was usually because native spanish speaking VA's had trouble pronouncing the names (like Eudial to Luyal) , a logical adaptation of an all english character name to spanish to make it easier for the viewers (like Tiger's Eye to Ojo de Tigre which is a direct translation to spanish of the character's original name in english) or because of errors in the pronounciation of japanese romanji (Sailor Lead Crow was called Sailor Lead Kurow. In this case the U in romanji japanese should be silent).

Q: How many episodes are legally available in video for purchase?

Comarex SA. de CV. got the rights to sell some of the episodes of the first season of the TV series on VHS, along with the 3 movies. They made 3 videos of the first 9 episodes of the first season, each tape has 3 episodes each. It may sound very little in comparison to all of the episodes that Pioneer and ADVfilms have launched into the market; but unlike in Spain, it isn't normal to get a long anime in video (and much less DVD), so this was a great plus for Sailor Moon. Not even Dragon Ball had the luxury of having some of it's many episodes from the TV series sold in vhs (which is dumb because it only provoces people to illegally buy bootleg VCD's and DVD's when an original isn't available for sale).

Q: Is the Mexican dub the same as the dub made in Spain? It's the same language.

In essence, Castilian (Latin-American) and hispanic (Spain) spanish is considered the same language, but while there aren't that many grammatical differences between the two versions, each has a very different accent, like when you compare American english with Australian english.
Mexican spanish also manages words that are originally from indian languages (Example: Turkey can be called two ways in spanish: pavo which is the normal word and guajalote which was probably part of the nahuatl dialect).

Anime dubbed to spanish in Spain has high pitched voices with a heavy accent and they speak really fast. They have good actors (like Nuria Trifol), but not many other VA's that I know of. When you watch an anime dubbed in Spain, you will probably want to laugh out loud, because the actors speak so fast that it can make even serious anime really funny. (Ever watched the hispanic dub of Evangelion? Misato is way much funnier than ever). Most Latin-american fans really hate the accent in Spain dubs so every anime we get are dubbed to spanish in latin-america.

While an accent is present in Latin-American counties (especially Argentina); Mexican spanish (especially the accent in central Mexico) is rather slow and generally has a very neutral accent (many South-american anime fans do notice a bit of an accent in mexican dubs though.), which makes dubs look a lot more credible and have a sort of universal quality by making anime fans in all Latin-america enjoy it. Course I do think anime dubs made in South America are getting better. A lot of people loved how the Next and Try seasons of Slayers were dubbed to spanish in Venezuela (the first season of this anime was dubbed to spanish in Mexico). Rurouni Kenshin was dubbed in Colombia and while the accent of some characters is very noticeable, it isn't a bad dub. About 70% of anime fans approved it considering Colombia doesn't have any experience dubbing anime. Argentina is doing better at dubs (Spirited Away sounds very good in spanish and Geneshaft and Earth Girl Arjuna also sound good) too.

Getting back to the point; Spain's Sailor Moon dub has it's own name changes.
For example, Minako is called Carola, Mamoru is Armando and Michiru is Vicky. They used to only have the series dubbed until the SuperS season (which was shown on national TV there), but around the year 2000 they got the Stars season dubbed with probably some VA changes and it was shown on cable TV. As far as I know, they only have the R movie dubbed.

Q: Why did they call Sailor Pluto: "Sailor Plut"?

Sometimes they called her Sailor Plut and sometimes Sailor Plutón (Plutón means Pluto in spanish), but the reason why they tended to call her Sailor Plut during at least the R season was because they were afraid of a lawsuit from Disney. (this is only a rumor though)

Q: How come they pronouce the names of the Anima-mates: Sailor Aluminum Seilen, Sailor Lead Kurow and Sailor Airon Mouse instead of their real names, yet they do pronounce Sailor Tin Nyanko right?

Japanese is indeed a strange language when it comes to non-native words. The names you see here are actually the transliteration of how the original dub pronounced the names of these characters. This might be because when the show was being dubbed to spanish, they commited errors in the name pronounciation after romanizing the character's names from Katakana and were too dumb to simply assume the character's names come from english and thus had to pronounce their names with english pronounciation. Anyhow, it's still an accepted way to call the characters, it's not a complete goof-up.