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Anime Movie Rewind: Megazone 23
As my “watch an anime movie from each decade on the calendar, working backwards” project entered the 1980s it would seem to have plenty of films available, even with a constraint I’d settled on of taking the shrinkwrap off another Blu-Ray disc (not all of which, I’ll admit, were “recently acquired”) every time. For this decade, though, I avoided even a non-foolish consistency and opened up a long OVA recycling plans for an unfinished TV series, Megazone 23. There was the self-justification that this project is a last-minute lead-into a still more grandiose project starting next year to “watch an episode of anime from each year since it became established on TV,” but with that long-planned schedule tossing in half-hour OVAs every so often for years I had a hard time thinking of TV series that really held my attention. There was also the amused thought that parts of Megazone 23 had got on at least a few movie screens shuffled into “Robotech: The Movie,” leaving people ever afterwards to pick out various dubious parts of its production depending on how antagonistic they are to Carl Macek.
The new Megazone 23 Blu-Ray from AnimEigo, which might not have licensed or released all that many titles over the past twenty years or more but is still in business where so many other anime-releasing companies have vanished, happened to include the old “Streamline dub.” Having seen a comment it amounted to “Carl Macek’s personal do-over through bringing the Robotech: The Movie voice actors back,” I took a chance and switched to it. It didn’t bring me to that uncomfortable point I’ve long imagined of “understanding in my own bones why certain vocal people condemn all dubs of anime”; perhaps the voices sounding very familiar compared to the legally available parts of Robotech helped. I suppose I did wonder if a few moments of explanation sounded just a little garbled compared to memories of previous viewings, but I’d also already wondered a little this time around if the initial storytelling could seem a little disconnected in any language. There, though, the central conceit of the story, which I noticed a recent “Macross at forty” podcast suggest was a response to the earlier anime’s “city in space,” has long left me thinking an explanation in Megazone 23 voiced over a “you wouldn’t get this on TV, and not likely in a movie either” scene sets up “simulating a larger world might be possible,” but there’s not really an explanation for “how does it always stay the great-in-Tokyo 1980s?” Maybe that just means that, aware of how possessions and records pile up and people do get older, I’m in a different life position than those who bought and watched the OVA in the mid-1980s, even if I don’t succumb to supposing they were just interested in “cute mid-1980s anime girls, transforming robots, and J-pop.” Delving into potential explanations for my question, though, might seem to need so much imposed mental adjustment that I can almost sympathise with the underground military conspiracy trying to seize control if not for their gratuitous coups and murders on the way to determining what everyone else will think themselves. In any case, the downbeat leaving-off of the first OVA could be seen as grim not just for the main characters but the conspiracy. The great number of character design changes in its “Part Two” followup, though, might have played a small role in my not getting around to it this time before setting these thoughts down.
The new Megazone 23 Blu-Ray from AnimEigo, which might not have licensed or released all that many titles over the past twenty years or more but is still in business where so many other anime-releasing companies have vanished, happened to include the old “Streamline dub.” Having seen a comment it amounted to “Carl Macek’s personal do-over through bringing the Robotech: The Movie voice actors back,” I took a chance and switched to it. It didn’t bring me to that uncomfortable point I’ve long imagined of “understanding in my own bones why certain vocal people condemn all dubs of anime”; perhaps the voices sounding very familiar compared to the legally available parts of Robotech helped. I suppose I did wonder if a few moments of explanation sounded just a little garbled compared to memories of previous viewings, but I’d also already wondered a little this time around if the initial storytelling could seem a little disconnected in any language. There, though, the central conceit of the story, which I noticed a recent “Macross at forty” podcast suggest was a response to the earlier anime’s “city in space,” has long left me thinking an explanation in Megazone 23 voiced over a “you wouldn’t get this on TV, and not likely in a movie either” scene sets up “simulating a larger world might be possible,” but there’s not really an explanation for “how does it always stay the great-in-Tokyo 1980s?” Maybe that just means that, aware of how possessions and records pile up and people do get older, I’m in a different life position than those who bought and watched the OVA in the mid-1980s, even if I don’t succumb to supposing they were just interested in “cute mid-1980s anime girls, transforming robots, and J-pop.” Delving into potential explanations for my question, though, might seem to need so much imposed mental adjustment that I can almost sympathise with the underground military conspiracy trying to seize control if not for their gratuitous coups and murders on the way to determining what everyone else will think themselves. In any case, the downbeat leaving-off of the first OVA could be seen as grim not just for the main characters but the conspiracy. The great number of character design changes in its “Part Two” followup, though, might have played a small role in my not getting around to it this time before setting these thoughts down.