My Life In Fandom: Remembering "Megazone 23", & How It Made Peak Anime Happen

Mercury Falcon did a video on Megazone 23 three years ago. This is good stuff, so I'm sharing it here.

Megazone 23 is the catalyst for the OVA Boom of the 1980s, such that it got snapped up by Carl Macek to be assimilated into Robotech but that failed good and hard, and in retrospect that's for the best.

For the impatient: Yes, see this entire three-part series. Even when it errs, it's still good and worth the time to watch it. This is part of the Peak Anime era, and while not one of the best creations it is a seminal one and thus worthy of being part of the common experience. You lose a vital link in the cultural chain without it.

But, again, I'm going to point out something that should be obvious to observers: what formerly took a massive studio and all its expenses to produce this is now viable to be done by a fraction of the people, in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the budget. Yes, even with the loss of hand-painted cel-based animation, it is still viable to do this now that CG tools and techniques have matured to that degree of mastery.

We, as dissident creators, should be aware of the full potential of our tools. I will remind people that Astartes was a one-man-band operation, as are several other 40K fan films, and they go far more photo-realistic and go full 3D than Peak Anime would require. We can stop making excuses for disatisfying productions now.

Keep this in mind going forward. We don't need the Big Corporate world for a lot of merchandise now. We don't need OldPub to put out our novels, novellas, and comics now. We do not need to rely on major animation studios either. We should be prepared to accept the reality that if we can't find friends in Big Media beyond the Hellmouth, then we can and should build our own networks of cross-media production and do it ourselves.

Don't be too worried about the finances. We'll build up to that soon enough. Just keep creating, building and nuturing audiences, and when the time is right you'll be able to make that media move. Just as Megazone 23 took a disdained publishing route and blew it up into a medium of magic that created Peak Anime, we can take a disdained desolation and build it into a thriving scene of our own. We'll not just see the return of Peak Anime, but make it happen and on our terms.