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Buried Treasure - Megazone 23 Trilogy

Mohawk:

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If one looks deeply enough one will find the todays economic disaster is the direct child consumated by the "greed is good" mantra of the 80s and the "Okay that didn't work, but lets try this instead, because we love gambling with other peoples money, and nobody cares as long as we keep winning." of the 90s.

Actually, the 90s was more like, "Why do we need to manufacture anything, when the real money is in websites?" The 2000s just changed it from the Internet to housing.

I didn't like the art changes from OVA 1 to OVA 2, but I found the second OVA to be my favorite. I like how the main character is not a fan of adults and I found the action to be better in the second OVA than the first.

I might have to import the Megazone OVA 2 English LD for the dub.

I love me some Megazone 23. OVA 2 was my favorite. OVA 3 was very odd, but at the end of the day I liked it as well, though it was my least favorite part. This would have worked well as a TV series. Shame that never happened. I remember a couple years ago there was talk of a TV series being produced (I would have preferred it be done in the 80s but would have taken an 00s series) but it never came into fruition.

Personally, I think EVE saved the wrong guy. BD was the better man and had the right idea. Shogo was just a selfish prick spoiler[(the fact that he turns out to be the villain of part 3 is the only thing I liked about that one)]. In my mind BD managed to get away with whatever survivors he could in the end.

My friends and I had a joke that once Shogo and the Trash gang landed on Earth, the human race only last three more days because they killed each other while going through nicotine withdrawal.

Megazone 23 Part 2 still remains the worst totally watchable anime film in my collection. There are plenty of films with better plots that are a nightmare to sit through. There is no plot to the first hour of this movie, really, just smoking and drinking and a modicum of sex. But it is visually arresting enough to make it worth the time; there really hasn't ever been anything else that looked quite like this.

I enjoyed all three parts quite a bit, though three was the worse.

I think I liked one the best. Particularly the artstyle. Not that the new style didn't work in two. It did so quite well. Though it was so different that it was hard to connect the original characters a bit. Particularly when Yui cuts her hair. Since it wasn't even the same color, let alobe style, it sort of lacked some of the impact.

Still, a great series. Though the commentary ADV included for one was dreadful. Right down to the rampant mispronunciation of Mospeada. It had some interesting points, but one can't really care much when they go so far as to make fun of a character's death scene if memory serves.

If you're interested in learning more about Megazone 23, specifically Part One, I recommend you listen to an interview we conducted with its director, Noboru Ishiguro. We certainly didn't get to ask him even a fraction of the questions we had for him, but much of it pertained to Megazone 23 Part One on account that it was among the first anime OAVs to be created. I remain hopeful that the proposed Megazone 23 television series will still end up getting made after all these years. Did that PS3 game for Megazone 23 come out after all?

It did, it's just that nobody really talks about it. The last I remember hearing of it was a Famitsu (or some such magazine) review where it's apparently said that the story is interesting, but the gameplay isn't, and eyebrows are raised over why the game is on the PS3 in the first place (if you ever see screenshots of this, you'll see why - it's not the kind of game that needed so much horsepower).

As I recall, the plot was basically a continuation from Part 1 that ignores Part 2 and takes place in "2004" (or sometime around then), the Megazone having gone on for years with business as usual. Shogo never resurfaced. The player takes the role of the son of Yui and Shogo, apparently conceived during Part 1's delightful little sex scene, and pilots a Garland that looks just like the original, but is painted blue. Thus the title, Megazone 23: Blue Garland.

Buried Treasure wrote:

Part 1 was infamously reworked (barely) into the unwatchable and incoherent Robotech: The Untold Story, the famously never-released Robotech movie. (Grainy 16mm footage from Mospeda was added in at distributor Carolco's request, as they complained there were too many girls and not enough mecha.

A few corrections here; "Robotech the movie" did have a limited release in Texas for about a month in from July 1986. It was also released on video in a number of countries. In English it made it to the UK where it was released on VHS by Rank Home Video in 1988. It also got an English language release with Dutch subtitles from Vestron Video on VHS in Belgium and on PAL Laserdisc from Cascar Video in the Netherlands.

Also it was the infamous Cannon Films who produced the film, asking Macek to add Southern Cross footage (not Mospeda).

[There's also two dubs of Part 3, one by Manga Video in the UK (directed by Michael Bakewell) and the ADV one.
Damn! Would be interesting to see what the UK edition sounded like (though I probably wouldn't care either way).

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[quote="Buried Treasure"]Japanese producer Idol Co., Ltd. asked Harmony Gold to make an English version of Part 2 (which they subtitled back into Japanese for laserdisc release as "The International Version").

It was also released on DVD by Atlus in 2005 as a pre-order special when you ordered all three discs of their release of Megazone 23. I believe it also comes with a special edition version of the recent Megazone Playstation game.

One bizarre thing which I couldn't help noticing about part two was that the makers seem to like showing people's eyeballs bursting out of their heads as they are splattered!

Yeah, the 80's were a Golden Age of anime and Megazone 23 is a standard bearer for the age, I enjoyed parts 1 & 2 very much (3, not so much) cutting edge animation, an interesting story and pull no punches action sequences, Part 2 visually gets a little tough because it takes you time to associate who the characters from Part One are in this version but it's still very impressive, It's a collection that should be in every anime fan's library

WHAT
A
LOAD
OF
CRAP

Weird... I'm at this moment writing an article about the con where I discovered anime and Mz23 Pt 2 was my first exposure to the series. A friend I met there explained to me the whole Megazone / Robotech connection and the like at that con. I still love Pts. 1 and 2 and understand that some times when one production crew takes over from another, certain changes can result. As its a god memory, I still prefer the first international dub for Pt. 2 over the ADV one. I miss the 80's OAV market though when companies who didn't have enough funds for a full TV series or theatrical standard budget could throw out ideas straight to video, some with better results than others though I grant you. But yeah, high detail, mechs, general fun atmosphere but with serious storytelling, and Eve's music... Megazone 23 will forever be an anime gem to me.

Megazone 23 is truly an anime classic.

I own the first English dubbed version of Megazone 23 part 2 copied(recorded off the laser disc) on a vhs tape. And I own the original vhs tape of Streamline pictures release of part 1 english dubbed.

Renaissance: Actually, I thought Megazone had their only good commentary, since it didn't just summarize the show like every other commentary they've done.

Given your opinion, I advise you never to watch PART THREE then, you'll thank me for it!

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Given your opinion, I advise you never to watch PART THREE then, you'll thank me for it!

Actually I mentioned in my post that I did watch Part 3. I know my er... 'Opinion' of Part 2 is rather rabid, but really It just got to me in the worst way. I really liked part 1, and just can't get over the change in animation and storyline.

Mainly I just have a lot of distaste for the random gore. It's a pet peeve of mine to add gore to a movie when it would work just as well without it.

Anyway, on the talk of Part 3: Ok it was silly. I'm not about to defend it. But I think I was just so happy that it wasn't like part 2 that I just couldn't care.

I still wish I could play that game though. :/ Sounds really neat.

The first film had better songs than Macross, a more realistic worldview, and far more attractive and less annoying but otherwise identical green-haired dancer characters.

Having discovered all 3 of these by accident in a bored weekend a few months ago, I think they all work in different ways (like many 'classics' they're not available in the UK, so it'll be a sad day when the internet is monitored enough to stop people like me using our weekends in this way.)

I can see how the unnecessary but meticulous mechanical-tentacle-eyeball-guts violence in the 2nd film would annoy people, but to me it just went with the gasping at impressive detail. Seriously, if anyone knows of anything else hand-painted in the 80s without CG that is this detailed, please post in this thread; even Akira, which as far as I know was later? looked less impressive at times. Plus they raised the bar from Votoms and what I've seen of Fist of the North Star for silly-but-cool looking biker gangs, which takes some effort. Did the authorities in 80s Japan have a real problem with biker punks destroying society, or what?

The first film had better songs than Macross, a more realistic worldview, and far more attractive and less annoying but otherwise identical green-haired dancer characters.
Even from a straight female viewer perspective, the girl from the first film should not have had her character design changed for the 2nd; but meh, they re-used it for the virtual idol character,

and also included girls who actually had their own bikes instead of sitting on the back of them, and had a token fat-bird who was cool instead of comedy, so who cares...

The only problem with part 2 was the ending spoiler[where all his mates who had previouly been blown to bits by mecha machine gun (one of the more moving scenes of 80s suicidal biker-punk silliness, which ended with the only survivor bleeding on the floor giving the perfectly-manicured finger to the police) turned out to be alive..] I almost felt like I was watching an alternate happy-ending that had been tacked on later., especially as the first film ended more harshly with spoiler[the main character limping home after having his ass kicked, and most of his friends either dead or gone-home-to-hide-with-parents...]

And the third film works really well as a retro-ghost-in-the-shell, if you just ignore the potential for an entertaining lord of the flies scenario where 80s kids try and survive on earth without computer assistance or makeup.. But the ridicuous Char-clone freedom fighter dude who was actually called zeon or sion or something was pretty cool, (same character designer or what??)

as was the abuse of arcade game addiction to create short-lived cyborg mecha pilots plotline.. and the general floating through matrix/Blame/GITS cityscapes to the sound of trippy synthpop sequences. File under rubbish-but-beautiful? who knows, Im sure I was drunk by that point, but I liked it.

For some reason, there's an alternate LD opening for part 2.

ah another good ol' 80's anime that i remember watching, now after reading this i wish i could forget about it.

Zin5ki wrote:

I've just done a quick check, and it appears the UK VHS release only received a 12 rating from the BBFC. I was lead to believe it was slightly more violent than that.

The UK release actually Part 3, not Part 1. Bizarrely it also contains a 10 minute prologue created by Manga Video using footage from Part 3 which contains the back story of Megazone 23, some of it seemingly straight out of the mind of the dub script writer.