Over Rev! is a 90's manga about Ryoko Shino, a young woman, who is drawn into the world of street racing and her friends. It was created by Katsumi Yamaguchi and Team39 and serialized in Weekly Young Sunday. It tells the story of Ryoko Shino, a Japanese high school senior who gets into street racing. She used to be the best at track and field in school but during a race she tore her Achilles tendon, ending her dreams of being a track star. The manga goes over how she finds her new passion in life—street racing. It is unusual in the genre in that the central characters are mostly female. As she gets more involved she makes friends and grows as a person.
A live-action adaptation of the manga was released in 2001. The movie can be viewed [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iMiCG7NwDs
here]
This show provides examples of:
- Badass Driver: The characters are either this or comic relief.
- Best Her to Bed Her: The legend of the "speed of sound beautiful girl".
- Butt-Monkey: Takuro Aso, the brown bullet.
- Car Porn: It can get fairly techincal about cars and driving techniques.
- Contrived Coincidence: Sari Tachibana almost collides with Sawako when fleeing a Love Hotel with Takeo (Sawako's crush) in the passenger seat.
- Cool Car: Ryoko's MR2 may have been pulled off a scrapheap, but it's cool to her.
- Ethical Slut: Sawako is a good person, but her private life . . .
- Gas Siphoning: It's done to the cars at the scrapyard Ryoko works at. She uses the gas for her car.
- Gossip Evolution: The out of control rumors about the "speed of sound beautiful girl" cause a lot of the trouble for the female racers.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Not in the traditional way, but Ryoko drives a sports car while Toru has a cute practical city car.
- Oblivious to Love: Ryoko.
- Rice Burner: One story arc deals with the "Stock Car Wolf," an aspiring auto engineer who was obsessed with his father's "perfect" designs to the point that when his car was stolen and vandalized into a rice burner, he turned into a Knight Templar who challenged owners of modded cars to race against his stock model, with the stipulation that if (when) they lost, their cars would be taken and stripped of their mods. It takes losing to a "super stock" car - one that has been "modded" with subtle improvements to the original parts (in reality, restoring the original vision of the car engineers, before the marketing department messed up the specs) - to make him see reason.
- Those Two Guys: Bob and Saru.
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: Toru has trouble coping when his crush is more interested in cars than him.
- Women Drivers: Inverted. Female street racers have to be very good indeed to be taken seriously and the bad drivers in the series are male.
- Wrench Wench: Ryoko becomes capable of swapping out her car engine.
