Megazone 23, Part I was an anime landmark, Part II, a moneymaker but Part III is a let down.

Megazone 23, Part 1
OAV, 1985. Director: Norobu Ishiguro. 85 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Megazone 23, Part 2
OAV, 1986. Director: Ichirou Itano. 85 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Megazone 23, Part 3
OAV, 1989. Directors: Shinji Aramaki and Kenichi Yatagai. 102 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Shogo Yahagi is an adolescent biker cruising for girls and hangin’ out with the guys. A test-driver pal is showing him a prototype revolutionary new motorcycle when Men In Black show up and kill the pal for Knowing Too Much. Shogo escapes on the cycle, which he soon learns can transform into a “giant robot” battle armor. It is also a mobile terminal to a super-computer which reveals that Shogo’s world is completely false. He is not in mid-1980s Tokyo but in a simulacrum in space, Megazone 23, 500 years later. The Earth was destroyed by warfare and pollution, and the Megazones were a last-ditch scientific effort to save humanity until the planet could be made habitable again.

That time has almost come, but a power-hungry faction among the government leaders who know the truth are trying to gain control of the Bahamut super-computer for their own benefit. This could endanger the programming that is maintaining the safe illusion of peaceful 1980s Japan. Worse, the invincible automated weaponry from the planet-destroying wars has finally broken through Megazone 23’s cloaking and is coming to annihilate everyone.

Megazone 23, Part I is an anime landmark which is still well-worth watching. It was the first direct-to-video anime to become a big hit. Produced by the Artland and Artmic animation studios, it was released to video on March 5, 1985 and theatrically on March 23. It had popular music (one of the main characters, Eve Tokimaturi, is an idol singer who is discovered to be an A.I. created by Bahamut) and attractive character design by Haruhiko Mikimoto, the designer of the then mega-popular Macross characters.

It took advantage of the OAV market’s freedom from TV censorship to include adult themes. Shogo and his girlfriend Yui are clearly sleeping together, and she sees nothing wrong with sleeping with producers to break into show business. It is full of genuine consumer products for startling verisimitude: cans of Coca-Cola and Heineken beer, packs of Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes, Suzuki cycles and a Hard Rock Cafe.

Part I ends on a cliffhanger. Apparently it was not really expected to be a hit because when Megazone 23, Part II: Please Tell Me the Secret appeared a year later (theatrical release April 26, 1986; OAV release May 30; animation credited to A.I.C. as well as Artland and Artmic), the character designs were totally changed (now by Yasuomi Umetsu) and the story was much weaker, implying a new production crew. The original plot is brought to a conclusion, but it is almost buried under a subplot in which Shogo leads a punk rock biker gang, Trash, to overthrow the military, which has taken over “Japan” in a coup imitative of the military’s seizure of power in the 1930s. This is nicely directed but is about as convincing as would be a movie in which the Hell’s Angels take on and wipe out the entire U.S. Marine Corps.

There was no reason for Megazone 23, Part III except that Parts I and II made money. It was released as a two-part OAV serial of 50 minutes each; The Awakening of Eve (Sept. 28, 1989) and Day of Liberation (Dec. 22, 1989). It is set 1,000+ years later. The super-computer has returned humanity to Earth, but kept it imprisoned in a luxurious super-city, Eden, to protect the fragile ecological balance of the restored Earth. A rebel faction wants to overthrow the computer and escape Eden, while the scientific establishment that maintains the computer has evolved into a religion that demands the people worship it. Eiji Takanaka, the new teen computer-hacker protagonist who learns the truth and meets Eve, is such an imitation Shogo Yahagi that he complains about it. Part III is not bad but is definitely a ho-hum letdown after Part I. Do see Part I.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).