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Kanye West's Custom Akira Motorcycle Listed for Sale
posted on by Gia Manry
American television channel MTV's Geek News blog reports that a life-size display motorcycle based on the one driven by Kaneda in Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira anime film was put on sale on the Los Angeles site of the classifieds site Craigslist. The April 4 ad is now expired, although search engine Google provides the posted image (below, left) as a cached version of the page, confirming the bike's asking price of US$4,000.
Los Angeles-based E.P. Industries' automotive division, Customs by Eddie Paul, built the motorcycle replica for rapper Kanye West's music video "Stronger," embedded below via the official KanyeWestEVO YouTube account. The video, from West's album "Graduation" (which also featured cover art designed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami), featured several scenes inspired by Otomo's film and was filmed in Japan. Although the nonoperational replica did not appear in the final video, West and the video's producer signed it.
Sources: MTV Geek News, SlashFilm via AICN Anime