Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad

Beck:  Mongolian Chop Squad is a Japanese anime series. It was based on a manga series, simply titled Beck, which was written by Harold Sakuichi and published by Kodansha for the magazine Monthly Shonen Magazine. It originally ran from November 1999 to April 2008, and it lasted for 34 volumes in total.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Good animation, art-style and character designs.
 * 2) This is known for being arguably the most realistic anime to depict what it's like for young people to start a band, accurately depicting the struggles that they would actually have to overcome.
 * 3) Great voice acting.
 * 4) Amazing cast of characters, all of them are interesting, likable, complex, but flawed, and get character development as the series progresses.
 * 5) Yukio "Koyuki" Tanaka and Maho Minami are an amazing couple.  While in the anime they never become an official couple, they have outstanding on screen chemistry, which causes a lot of fans to justifyably ship them together.
 * 6) Excellent soundtrack.
 * 7) The English dub deserves special mention.  This is a music anime, which means there's a lot of singing.  It isn't often that you find dub actors that can sing as well as the ones here, without any sort of voice effects being placed on them, but these ones definitely can.
 * 8) Outstanding pacing.

Reception
The series won the 2002 Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category. In Japan, it has sold 12 million copies as of April 2008.

Media
After the release of the anime series, a video game was released titled BECK: The Game, which was developed by Sun-Tec, published by Marvelous Interactive, and released on March 31, 2005 for the Playstation 2. After that came a live action movie, which was directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, written by Tetsuya Oishi, and was released on September 4, 2010.