YMMV / Megazone 23

• Moment of Awesome:
  • Pretty much the entire bike chase sequence in Part II.
    • Cyndi, behind Yui who is riding a motorcycle during the chase scene, shooting one of the military Garlands in the Garland's FOV camera.
• Awesome Music: "Rock Cafè" from Part I, "Himitsu Kudasai" (Please Tell Me the Secret) from the end of Part II, and "Sleepless Beauty in the Woods" from Part III.
• Broken Base: The Mega Zone 23 fanbase can't seem to decide on much of anything.
  • Which installment of the series is the best? Is Part II an interesting, different, unique continuation of the series, or is it just a mindless gorefest?
  • Which English dub of the series is best? The Streamline Pictures dub of Part I? The Manga UK dub of Part III? The ADV Films dub of the entire series?
  • Is the ADV dub a well-done adaptation of the original, or does it suffer from Totally Radical rewrites and overzealous acting due to a bad direction job?
• Harsher in Hindsight
  • The monitoring of e-mails and people in cyberspace are identical to NSAleaks in Part III.
  • Eve never has a relationship with Shogo or Eiji. Many idol singers have gone on record as being forbidden to date to keep their image pure ^note  it's a case by case basis depending on what their agencies wants to go with, for example, Dempagumi.inc's Mirin Furukawa is married despite being an idol .
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • EVE is initially portrayed as a digital idol whose voice and appearance is sampled from, in universe, a young girl who worked on the Megazone project, identically to how a Vocaloid is created.
  • The series was envisioned as a 12-episode series, but the sponsors pulled their support halfway through, forcing it to be compiled into four slightly disjointed movies. However, the series length is roughly 260 minutes long, including credits. One episode in anime is 20 minutes long without credits. Work it out.^note Part of the problem might have been that they planned to do hour long episodes, evidenced by how there's little continuity between Part 1 and 2, but the second two movies can be joined together seamlessly.
  • Generation Ships sent away to preserve humanity while giving a ruined Earth time to heal and an Artificial Intelligence named EVE? Are we talking about this OVA or WALL•E?
  • Vic Mignogna as Shogo and Allison Keith as Yui is going to be some chuckles when in the Full Metal Panic! series, Kurz tries to gets into a relationship with Mao and fails every time.
• Ho Yay: Part II. An article in an old anime-focused e-magazine had a first-time viewer of the Harmony Gold dub tell the writer that "Johnny Winters" was gay as soon as it was over. Exhibit A: the scene where Shogo and Lightning light each other's cigarettes while looking into each other's eyes.
• Macekre: The Harmony Gold release.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.":
  • In the United States, Megazone 23 only appeared as a poorly received part of Robotech.
  • In the United Kingdom, due to the poor reception of the Harmony Gold dub, their exposure to Megazone 23 was solely Part III, merged into one two-hour long film.
  • It took until ADV Films releasing a consistent dub of all four parts before ANYONE in the English-speaking countries got the full story.
• Narm: Aside from the obvious/already-stated, there's Yui's voice in the new dub.
  Yui: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!?!!?!!?!?!?!?
  • Cyndi in Part 2, voiced by Tiffany Grant, is worse - and even more annoying.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The wire massacre scene in Part II, where even the excessively smooth and uncanny animation adds to the horror of the inevitable carnage.
  • The fact that a majority of the population (save for Shogo and the gang) are wiped out by the Dezalg at the end of Part II. Might seem a bit tame compared to later examples of a city crashing down, but the thought of you, an innocent civilian minding their own business, is suddenly crushed by the rubble that once was, in this case, Tokyo, all because of an alien attack.
• Retroactive Recognition: In the Harmony Gold release, Wendee Lee voiced Stacy Embry (Mai). Wendee would go on to voice characters like Faye Valentine, Twilight Suzuka, Yoruichi Shihoin, Haruhi Suzumiya and Konata Izumi, among others.
  • Meanwhile, Robert V. Barron - who voiced Professor Embry - later became Abraham Lincoln.
• Superlative Dubbing: Depending on who you ask (see Broken Base at the top of this page), any of the uncut series dubs could qualify for this (the dubs done by Streamline Pictures, ADV Films and Manga UK, to be precise).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Does anybody else think that "Himitsu Kudasai" sounds like "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys?
• Tear Jerker:
  • Shogo's defeat (and slow recovery) at the hands of B.D. might definitely count.
  • Eiji and Eve's last interaction with each other at the end of Part III, where they share a "kiss" between the glass that she is in before she is sent into space. The sentimental "Pandora Boat" does not even help matters.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series absolutely screams the 1980s with the hairstyles, fashion, music, technology, and just about everything. It was such a caricature of the decade, that the ADV Films dub played this up by peppering in 80s slang, and treated the series like an intentional period piece.
• Woolseyism: The MegaCorp that doubles as government of Eden in Part III is called EX in the original version (pronounced "ee-ex" by the Japanese voice actors), but in the original Manga dub the characters called it the "Ex-Eye", which dovetailed nicely with the font used for "EX" making the two letters resemble an eye with the separated middle stroke of the E standing in for the iris, an ideal fit for their role in the story.