Megazone 23

"Operator 7-G, please respond!"

Teenager Shogo Yahagi is a motorcycle nut with few cares in the world; he and his friends do little more than ride around and have fun. This all changes when one of his older friends leaves a mysterious, incredibly-advanced motorcycle called the Bahamut in Shogo's possession. The Bahamut is far more than it seems, and a mysterious cabal of men in black seems willing to do anything to get it back. Soon, Shogo discovers some of the secrets hidden in the Bahamut, and it leads him to even more -- secrets that will completely change his understanding of the world he lives in.

Now if only he and his friends can survive his discoveries...

Released March 1985, Megazone 23 (pronounced "Megazone Two Three") is historically significant for being one of the very first OVAs and also was one of the first anime to extensively interweave music with the plot. The story itself was a mindbender at the time, and is a forerunner of such later American works as The Matrix and Dark City. Since then, the plot twists and the character types have become standard in anime, almost cliche in some instances, but as a certified classic it is still worth seeing.

The original American distributions of Megazone 23 were anything but impressive. It was briefly released in North America by Harmony Gold as Robotech the Movie. Carl Macek crudely spliced in footage from Robotech to force a linkage between the two shows, and of course the usual Macek dub script was conjured up out of nothing to replace the original dialogue. MacekHarmony Gold also produced a dub of Part 2, which was only released in Japan as an aid for teaching English. (The release also included the alternate ending for Part 1 that was produced for the Robotech movie as an extra). Later, a different production house released a dub of an unbutchered version, but the result, reportedly, was still horrendous.

For decades, only bootleg Fan Subs of the original show were available in America, but it was re-released with a new English dub in the summer of 2004 by ADV Films. In 2019, AnimEigo announced plans to release Megazone 23 on Blu-ray.

Megazone 23 was revived in 2007 with a Playstation 3 RPG game, Blue Garland; the game takes place in an Alternate Continuity that diverges after Part I, and revolves around Hiroto Takanaka, the son of heroine Yui.

Not to be confused with MegaZone.[1]

Tropes used in Megazone 23 include:
  1. ↑ The person born Brian Bikowicz, the co-author of Undocumented Features, legally changed his name to MegaZone because he was such a big fan of this anime.
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