MEGAZONE 23 PART 2

this review originally appeared in 2005 at Anime Jump. Like Part 1, the DVD is currently available at bargain prices and you should totally get it.

It’s tough for me to review this film objectively. It’s an integral part of my late teenage psyche. I wasn’t a particularly introspective 18-year old, but there were two things I was sure of – I liked punk music and I liked Japanese cartoons, and MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 combined them both in a package convenient enough to stick in the pocket of your trenchcoat and impress your fellow late-80s teens with at any gathering.

And why not? It’s a Japanese cartoon starring punk rock kids on motorcycles who defy the police with machine guns and super robots in a battle to expose the massive fraud that underlies their very society. The film obsesses over details like beer cans and cigarette packaging and stars doppelgangers of the “Like A Prayer” Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and female pro wrestlers, and instead of the bug-eyed, melon-headed look that segregates most anime to the back of the visual arts bus, MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 stars recognizable human beings with nostrils and scars and sex lives. It’s about as far as you can get from SPEED RACER and still be a Japanese cartoon.

I think I went to high school with these guys

I can’t say PART 1 interested me overmuch; the Mikimoto character designs seemed like stale MACROSS, the Garland motorcycle-robot was entirely too functional, and on the whole I was more interested in watching VAMPIRE HUNTER D or DIRTY PAIR. PART 2, on the other hand, was a completely different story, and I mean that sincerely. It didn’t look, act, sound, or smell anything like the first MEGAZONE. In fact it didn’t look like anything we’d ever seen, at all. You could tell right away – via Yasuomi Umetsu’s no-nonsense character designs - that this wasn’t some kids’ TV cartoon tarted up for a direct-to-video release. Hell, in the first two minutes there are about six misdemeanors and eighteen felonies contained in a scene of mayhem and property destruction as wild if not wilder than anything Hollywood or Hong Kong would offer that year (1985!!) And this isn’t outer-space flying saucer nonsense – these are real life Tokyo neighborhoods being overrun by 80’s punker bosuzoku.

Except they’re not: this Tokyo is a fake, a prop, a stand-in. The real Earth’s been destroyed and the human race is inside the Megazone, a giant space ship big enough to hold entire cities and millions of people, some of whom know they’re living out one of science fiction’s hoariest cliches and others who never wonder why no one they know has ever actually been, you know, outside the city.

The unbelievable truth

Our hero Shogo Yahagi would still be one of these brainwashed proles if he hadn’t had the good sense to get involved in the hot motorcycle business. Turns out his stolen bike was a top-secret transforming giant combat robot designed to fight aliens in outer space, and that his entire life has been spent inside a giant space station, whose main computer systems are controlled by an artificial intelligence who moonlights as an idol singer known as EVE. While investigating this mystery- well, okay, he was committing grand theft super transforming robot motorcycle, all right? -Shogo winds up accused of murder and on the run, and that’s where PART 2 starts.

Holographic or not, the gals all love Shogo

Reunited with his biker pals, Shogo rekindles his romance with Yui and works out a plan to fool the authorities and find out once and for all what’s really going on. Meanwhile his opposite number in the government, the enigmatic B.D., can’t spend too much time searching for Shogo, because the hideous space aliens that attacked the Earth have found the Megazone, and are kicking ass on Earth spaceships with weapons that remind us uncomfortably of Roto-Rooter Gone Wild.

Naturally the key to everything is finding EVE. Aren’t most of life’s mysteries solved through communion with idol singers – especially computer-generated ones only slightly more artifical than the real thing? The incongruity of seeing total punk rockers going gaga over easy-listening top-40 pop music takes the edge from PART 2’s realism. On the other hand the punks of 1988 were going apeshit over the “swing revival” ten years later, so anything’s possible. When EVE isn’t singing, the Shirou Sagisu soundtrack ranges from moody 80s synth to some good honest speed metal guitar work.

typical anime club meeting circa 1985

After a running battle through “Tokyo” between the motorcycle punks and the cops and the all-out space assault by the sicko aliens, B.D. and Shogo achieve detente of sorts, though it’s academic at that point because EVE has activated A.D.A.M. and that means that the Megazone is destroyed in a total rotoscoped-from-atom-bomb-test-footage sequence that still looks pretty impressive. At this point you can either make some sort of fancy-pants biblical reference about Eve giving Adam knowledge which drives them out of Eden (Megazone), or you can make a joke about the Coleco Adam, possibly the worst home computer ever marketed to a confused American public. The choice is yours.

Not to give anything away (I think the spoiler warning has expired in a 20 year old film) but MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 ends its tired science fiction cliche of people living on a space ship so big they think they’re on Earth with another tired science fiction cliche of a small group of survivors left to repopulate a new planet. But that’s OK; you kind of want a familiar ending after the A-bomb test footage. Besides, if you’re watching MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 and aren’t focused on the visuals, you’re missing out, because the darn thing looks great. There’s a lot of rotoscoping and serious attention is paid to light and shadow and color and hair and clothes. There’s none of the fakey shorthand stuff so often seen in TV anime. Not that there aren’t outer-space giant robot laser gun battles in this film – there are, and plenty of ‘em – but there’s a real attempt to convince us that the high-tech and the low-brow exist in the same world. The animation’s reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, but even the less competent scenes have a punky charm.

eat hot lead, fascist pig transforming robot!

The dub pedigree of MZ23 2 is iffy; an English track by Intersound (the Robotech people) was included on a Japanese LD, but it never got a proper US release. I didn’t get my bootleg video pirate copy until 1988! ADV’s new dub ditches many of the earlier version’s more colorful moments; no longer do machine-gun toting punk chicks shout “EAT HOT LEAD FASCIST PIG!” while lighting up a police helicopter. However, the ADV script does actually acknowledge the existence of a PART 1, something the 80s version glossed over entirely, and dodges some of the production pitfalls of the earlier incarnation (hint: when a character complains about noise, it helps to actually have noises in the background). The voice work is smooth – almost too smooth at times for the characters, who, after all, are unemployed squatters with bad personal hygiene – but overall ADV’s version is professional and entertaining all the way.

Ultimately, in the face of the film’s climax, the valiant stand of the motorcycle teens against the adult world of authority winds up being pretty meaningless. Just like real life. Still, as director Ichirou Itano says in the accompanying interview, the real message of the film is the you should take defeat gracefully and move on to the next challenge with no regrets, because you did your best and it’s not your fault the world is filled with phonies, Holden Caulfield.

BD bulks up, gets fashion sense, punches Shogo's lights out

The interview is part of one of the disc’s extras, a fold-out poster. Itano, the inventor of the now-ubiquitous “missiles flying everywhere” visuals used in most SF anime, was given carte blanche to follow his bliss with MZ23 2, and the result is an anti-authoritarian epic with a heart and sharp as hell looks.

best use of multiplane camera rack-focus zoom ever.

Maybe you’re just looking for some 1980s revival anime, or if you always wanted to see the anime take on the Sid Vicious look, or if your jones for severe realism via Japanese cartoon character design wasn’t satisfied by AKIRA or JIN-ROH. If you want anime with colorful and unique characters, cosmic storylines, and plenty of property damage and beer, then MEGAZONE 23 PART II is where you need to be.

Next: probably not reviewing "Megazone 23 Part 3 Part 1", because that would involve me, you know, having to watch it.

MEGAZONE 23 PART ONE

Guest reviewer Shaindle Minuk gives us this review of MEGAZONE 23 PART ONE, which originally appeared in 2004 on the Anime Jump website, back when this DVD was new. You can now find it for as little as $3; definitely worth picking up.

Originally planned as a full television series, Megazone 23, released in 1985, wound up being a pioneer in the then-fledgling Original Video Animation market. It shares much of its creative staff with 1984's Macross: Do You Remember Love, in particular character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto (aka "Hal"), though in this case his design is limited to one character: pop idol Eve Tokimatsuri. Although the rest of the cast is designed by Toshitaka Hirano, Hirano's style is close enough to the Mikimoto school of design that there is plenty of visual consistency, while still ensuring that Eve has a slightly different look that makes her stand out from the rest of the characters. This is important, because Eve is most definitely not like other girls.



Megazone 23 Part 1 has actually been dubbed twice before into English, first as a semi-aborted attempt at a Robotech movie called Robotech: The Untold Story. New scenes were animated for this, and the dialogue strongly re-worked in order to link up the storylines to the Robotech TV series, but the movie only saw release for a handful of test screenings. It's just as well. A few years after this aborted franken-sequel, Carl Macek's Streamline Pictures released a reasonably straight dubbed adaptation to video, later ported to a bare-bones DVD release from Image. This new DVD version is, of course, a direct translation and of no relation whatsoever to Robotech or Macek's old Megazone 23 dub.

I don't want to describe too much of Megazone 23's plot, because there are a few interesting twists in the script-- and while it's not like they're going to BLOW YOUR MIND or anything (this isn't The Manchurian Candidate I'm talking about here) they were fairly innovative at the time and provided inspiration for subsequent popular entertainment on both sides of the Pacific. Suffice it to say that Shogo Yahagi is a fun-loving 18 year old who loves motorcycles and girls and supports these interests by working at McDonald's (an amazingly realistic touch for a science-fiction/fantasy anime hero). His existence becomes decidely less carefree the night his buddy Shinji shows him a weird-looking motorcycle enscribed with the word "Bahamoud." This bike is some sort of top-secret experimental weapon and Shinji quickly pays with his life for letting this little secret out of the bag when he and Shogo are surprised by duplicitous, mysterious government agent BD and his henchmen. Shogo makes off with the special bike and in short order finds himself way over his head-- no small feat when you consider the sheer enormity of his 80s hairdo.



And make no mistake, this anime is very much a product of the 80s. HOO BOY, is it a product of the 80s. The interesting thing about this is that there are very good reasons for the specificity of details, above and beyond the mere fact that it was actually produced in the 1980s. The setting, Tokyo in the mid 80s, is very deliberate and lovingly detailed. Street and neighbourhood names are rattled off by the characters, who spend their time in landmarks easily identifiable for anyone who's ever spent any time in that city. This versimillitude-- well, if you can suspend your disbelief for the presence of "video phones" and punkers who rock out to J-pop idol singers-- is necessary for the full impact of the revelations made in later scenes. Metaphorically, the story (like a lot of anime, really) could be described as a dramatization of the point where youthfulness collides with mature reality, the loss of innocence that occurs when you realize how creepy and corrupt and dangerous all the adults surrounding you are. Not unlike Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, the teenagers in Megazone 23 discover that the world is full of "phoneys".



English captions give your Japanese art books class

Of course, unlike Holden's New York City, the world of Megazone 23 is full of actual, literal phoneys. This again works well for the setting, because the 80s, especially Tokyo in the 80s, was an amazingly artificial time and place. The music is, fittingly, high-adrenaline mid-80s synth-pop without a single "live" instrument in the whole ding-dang score, and the three songs sung by Eve (seiyuu: Kumi Miyasato) are catchy and quite good, if you happen to like 80s-era J-pop (which I do). The first one, "Sentimental Behind My Back," notably contains what is probably J-pop's only reference to Jewish folk painter Marc Chagall, so what's not to like?




The design aesthetic of the anime is, as stated earlier, very good at providing a realistic setting for a fairly fantastic story. The character and mecha designs match up well in their balance between cartooniness and realism. The actions scenes are pretty well-animated, but the character animation is sort of lackluster. OVAs of this era tended not to have big budgets (the big bucks were reserved for feature films) and it shows here. It's not terrible, but it's pretty stiff and there's a lot of inconsistency, especially in scenes where character and mecha are shown together.



Just beat it

The DVD is of good quality and as is usually the case with DVD releases of old anime, the dust and brush strokes on the cels are clearly visible. Otherwise, it's a very good, clean print of the film. It's got some ads at the beginning but you can skip past them. The extras consist mainly of lots of pre-production artwork and a commentary track by the people in charge of the dub, anchored by one Matt Greenfield, which is interesting if you are into the early days of anime fandom in North America-- these folks are certainly qualified! There is also an insert with a lovely "Hal" painting of Eve on one side and a very interesting history of the development of the Megazone 23 storyline and characters on the reverse.



The psuedo-Shinjuku of MEGAZONE 23

I had one problem coming into this dub, which is that PEOPLE IN THE 1980'S DID NOT SAY "MY BAD" ARGH ARGH ARGH. Anachronistic slang really pisses me off. It's particularly odd given that the rest of the dub is almost self-conscious about the fact that the setting is firmly planted in the mid-80s, even going to the trouble of adding references to A Flock of Seagulls and whatnot in order to remain true to the era. The voices, by and large, are fine, not exactly the same as the Japanese voices (well, except the singing of course). Shogo seems less carefree and more, well, wussy in the dub, though, which didn't really work for me. Maybe they were trying to mitigate the scene in which he slaps romantic interest Yui during an argument by making him come off as harmless, I don't know. Speaking of which, that is really the most dated part of the whole video, big hair and idol singers aside. Back in the 1980s, it was actually considered acceptable for an anime hero to give his girl a slap if the occasion called for it. Of course here in North America we know better (DON'T WE?!) but Japan is obviously a different culture and aside from the somewhat slower rate that women's rights have gained ground over there, there's a certain precedence in Japanese culture for "slapping some sense" into people. So what seems really distasteful and inappropriate to us would probably just seem like par for the course to the Japanese. Nevertheless, if nothing else has improved about anime in the past 20 years, it is extremely gratifying to see that good-natured anime heroes don't go around slapping heroines anymore. (If anything, the pendulum may've swung too far in the other direction, but that's neither here nor there.)



Shogo and Eve at their day jobs

Aside from that, there are certain things that don't quite make sense when translated into English-- small talk about blood types, for example-- but otherwise it works out okay. There are changes to details of the dialogue, most of them presumably for either clarity or timing, and I can't figure out why everyone in it answers the phone by saying "Yes???" but otherwise it seems pretty close to the subtitled version. It's no Robotech: The Untold Story, anyhow, thank God.


All in all, I highly recommend this DVD for anyone with fond memories of this production's initial release, as well as anyone who likes a good urban science-fiction story. It's got motorcycles that transform into robots, bad guys who may actually be good guys, brainwashing, violence, romance, some tasteful sex scenes, some rather distasteful sex scenes, catchy J-pop, and references to the obscure 80s film Streets of Fire. I ask again, what's not to like?

next: Dave reviews MEGAZONE 23 PART TWO

Prince Planet Flashback 2012 23: part II

The next eight pages of our exciting Usei Shonen Papii story, translated by Rick Zerrano, all for you! Remember to read from right to left for maximum comprehensibility.


















Sorry it ends on a cliffhanger - be sure to pick up next week's SHONEN and find out what happens to Prince Planet! Next week being, of course, sometime in 1965.

Prince Planet Flashback 2012

Just in time for the new year, here's some old manga! This Usei Shonen Papii manga story is straight outta a 1965 issue of SHONEN MAGAZINE. Thrill to the cheap paper, the insubstantial printing, the inevitable foxing and discoloration that comes with the territory of 47 year old newsprint! Translation and typesetting by Rick Zerrano, scans and touchup by me. Click on pages while shouting "Papii!" to enlarge images.



















Will Prince Planet - er, I mean Papii - defeat the mystery robot? What's the secret behind Black and White? Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion to our manga story! Brought to you by GLICO. Gu-ri-co, gu-ri-co, GUU-RII-COOO...

DEVILMAN SAVES CHRISTMAS

It turns out public generosity can give complex Tezuka manga second printings, so where's the love for our other lost English-edition manga treasures? Like, say, DEVILMAN: THE DEVIL'S INCARNATION, out of print now for 24 years?



Just like the Beelzebub of legend, Devilman has appeared in many forms - as the blue-skinned superhero of a Toei TV cartoon, in two late-80s OVAs, co-starring with Mazinger Z in the high-art cinema MAZINGER Z VS DEVILMAN, as a devil-munchkin in CB CHARA GO NAGAI WORLD, in games for the NES and PSX, and as the star of his own live-action film. And as a lady. The manga career of Devilman spans 52 chapters serialized in the venerable SHONEN MAGAZINE, a update/remake/reboot titled SHIN DEVILMAN from '79, and appearances in other Go Nagai manga like VIOLENCE JACK. As an apocalyptic, H.P. Lovecraft-meets-the Hell's Angels story of immensely powerful beings from beyond the laws of time and space annhilating each other with savage fury, DEVILMAN can be a sacireligious ultraviolent adventure story or as a sobering reminder of the insignificant part human beings play in the larger cosmos.


look out for that elephant guy

But apart from the shoddy floppy-comic release of SHIN DEVILMAN by Glen "Small Man Syndrome" Danzig's Verotik, the original DEVILMAN manga has never been translated or released in English. Except when it has! In 1986 Nagai's own Dynamic Productions released a 200+page trade-paperback edition of DEVILMAN in English. THE DEVIL'S INCARNATION was translated, charmingly hand-lettered, flopped to read Western-style, has a garish color cover, and would have been great to see in the mall bookstores of America alongside the Donning/Starblaze ELFQUEST color books, WATCHMEN, and, in a few years, Go Nagai's full-color painted MAZINGER graphic novel.


pretty much a whole book of custom-van paintings of monster robots

THE DEVIL'S INCARNATION delivers the manga-reading experience magnificently; sized for the American book market, it had great potential to deliver a one-two manga punch to readers and maybe even get "the manga boom" started a decade or so early. DEVILMAN's failure was in distribution. Meaning, there wasn't any. I found my copy in the mid 90s, hidden in a shelf of marked-down books in the back of a record store. This is not what I call "promotion". Was this ever distributed in a reasonable fashion? How did it end up in Criminal Records? Why did Dynamic Productions insert itself mysteriously into American publishing and then just as mysteriously vanish?


mild-mannered Akira Fudo, reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper

The story, for those as yet untouched by Devilman, is that Akira Fudo, a well-known crybaby and wuss, is visited by his best friend Ryo, who convinces him to merge with the devil Amon. And with friends like that who needs enemies? The combination of Akira and Amon becomes Devilman, sworn to defeat the legions of devils that existed long before mankind and who lay slumbering in the depths of the earth, Lovecraft style.


devilman, I choose YOU

Go Nagai's artwork still retains the cutesy cartoony "Shameless School" look, but when things get real you can see the brushline vibrate and the ink start to get all intense. By the time Akira and Ryo are slugging back whiskey in a basement full of half-naked hippies doomed to be possessed by hideous demons, we have moved into new and disturbing manga territory.





Certainly this is not what Americans were expecting from their Japanese comics in 1986 - if it didn't have slick Studio Nue mecha and cute pastel-accented idol singers then America simply wasn't interested, thanks. Alternatively, had an enterprising publisher delivered DEVILMAN to American audiences in 1972, the decadent, violent saga would fit perfectly with your Stooges records and your 42nd Street grindhouse shockers.


raw power can destroy a man

Viewers of the excellent 1987 DEVILMAN: THE BIRTH video know where the story goes - the Akira/Amon combo defeats a room full of grotesque monsters and realizes his devil-fighting destiny. That's how DEVILMAN: THE DEVIL'S INCARNATION ends, Akira and a battered, unconscious Ryo surrounded by the bloody remnants of a devil army, wondering what the future holds. That's a good question. Will this be the only representation given to 45 years of Go Nagai's manga in North America? Or will there emerge a publisher with taste and vision to deliver the raw power of DEVILMAN once again to the English-language world?



Thanks to Mike Toole for inventing the phrase "Devilman Saves Christmas". Happy Holidays to all and see you in 2012!