Trivia / Golgo 13

• Acting for Two: The elevator fight between Golgo and Snake in the English dub: both characters are voiced by Gregory Snegoff using remarkably different voices.
• Actor Allusion:
  • With some casting gag for Shinichiro Miki, playing a blond mercenary sniper. He's Kurz reincarnated to be a bad guy.
  • Another gag is used when casting Shuichi Ikeda as the cult leader Gabriel from "The Saint with the Stench of Death". Naturally, the only guy who could voice a charismatic blond man who wears a mask is the one famous for voicing a charismatic blond man who wears a mask.
• Banned Episode: Several stories have been skipped from tankobon editions as they were deemed to be offensive or libelous:
  • Story #237 featured a plot where the Iranian government makes a clone of their supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini, enough to cause protests from the Iranian Embassy in Japan.
  • Story #245, "Prisoner Swap Exchange", was initially banned from tankobon editions due to negative portrayal of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a prisoner exchange plot with the Israelis. It was later included in other reprints, such as the volume 175 of the soshuhen (complete works) edition in 2012, where the PLO was replaced with a fictional counterpart.
  • Story #266, "Vatican Set", featured a Vatican bishop engages in money laundering and child abuse. The depiction of the corruption was so graphic that it never appeared in a tankobon; it was later revised and reprinted in a Reader's Choice collection in 2018.
  • Two special stories that were skipped are #20, which features an actor whose life was ruined due to his positive test for AIDS and #32, "Indictment of the Iron Cross", which had Duke Togo wearing a Nazi uniform at one point within the story. The latter story was scanlated at one point, however.
• Died During Production: Series creator Takao Saito died in September 2021 at the age of 84, with the series yet to have been concluded. However, he is said to have left notes and storyboards on how the series should be concluded with his passing, so a Posthumous Collaboration is likely.
• No Export for You: Quite an odd case, due the nature of the series, no matter in how many countries the manga will be licensed, it will always be, in a sense, incomplete. All known licensed prints of the manga follows the same rule of selecting some iconic missions Golgo has taken and release it in a few dozen volumes, leaving aside hundreds of original volumes in the process; although thanks to the episodic and self-contained storytelling of the series, only completionist aficionados will feel bad about this.
• The Other Darrin: Throughout the franchise's long history, Golgo 13 has been portrayed by different actors, with no Role Reprise at all. The first live-action film had Ken Takakura playing him; only to be replaced by Sonny Chiba in the second, Assignment Kowloon. Tetsuro Sagawa and Gregory Snegoff voiced him in The Professional OVA, and then by Tesshō Genda and John DiMaggio in the Queen Bee OVA. The TV anime had Hiroshi Tachi and David Wald voice the enigmatic assassin.
• Playing Against Type: The Queen Bee OVA sees John DiMaggio, mostly known for loud and energetic characters, as the rarely-speaking (and low-key when he does speak) titular Golgo 13. Bennett White even called it the voice acting equivalent of getting Gary Oldman to play Silent Bob.