Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is There A Need for Tenchi?
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2561 Location: Online Terminal |
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The Venn diagram between my experience with Tenchi and Steve's is nearly a circle (I think my website of choice was Ryo-Ohki's Vacation or something like that). The show caused my fandom to evolve and I think a lot of that was it wasn't really an action show for most of its runtime (though I recall "In Tokyo" sorta was and that was probably another reason why few liked it despite cabbit mecha).
I also agree with Coop in that Eda is just Ryoko who lived long enough to become Washu. |
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b-dragon
Posts: 631 |
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I...actually kinda like War on Geminar. I'm not going to claim high television or anything, but its actually one of my favorite things to watch while I'm doing something else. I think it helps that its only tangentially connected to the broader sphere of Tenchi- what ties there are seem pretty minor, if significant.
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1792 |
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Well, it's about damn time Eda the Owl Lady showed up around here.
Anyway, it's amazing how things change. I'm ancient enough to remember how the fan consensus during Tenchi's Toonami broadcast was that Universe was disposable junk, because its plot was too simple and it dialed down the raciness compared to the OVA. That attitude had always bothered me because I had a fondness for Universe: it feels like more of a hangout show, giving the gang a chance to really bounce their personalities off each other as opposed to the OVA which seemed preoccupied with shoving increasingly complex lore dumps into every episode. But today, it seems like Universe is finally being appreciated. Maybe because people's tastes have changed, or maybe because the OVA seems a lot less essential once we discovered that its mess of plotlines wasn't headed anyplace interesting. But it's nice that one of my very first anime series is finally getting the love it deserves. Incidentally, you could probably get a whole other column out of the legacy of Pretty Sammy, a show that spawned multiple alternate-universe spinoffs of its own, and also seemed to inspire other anime to give their heroines alt-universe magical girl shows, too. Without Pretty Sammy, would we have seen the likes of Nurse Witch Komugi or Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya? Not to mention the entire Nanoha series, which got so big that the original franchise it spun off from is almost completely forgotten these days. |
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Great Rumbler
 Posts: 349 Location: Oklahoma |
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My first exposure to the franchise was an airing of Tenchi Muyo in Love on the Scifi Channel back in the late-90s, sometime before it started airing on Cartoon Network.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 3005 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I mean, Negishi also directed titles like the NG/VS Knight Lamune series, the Bakegyamon anime (which we only got the manga version of in English), Sonic Soldier Borgman, & Tekkaman Blade, so I don't think it's really fair to judge him based solely on his more fanservice-friendly titles. It'd be like judging Mamoru Kanbe only off of his more lighthearted & comedic works (Panda-Z, Ninjala, Comet-san [2001], Machine Robo Rescue), while ignoring his more dramatic works (Elfen Lied, Perfect Insider, Promised Neverland, Sound of the Sky, You & Me.), but I digress. Anyway, I do remember watching the original run of the OG Tenchi Muyo Ryo-Ohki OVA a good while ago when a friend wanted to rewatch it, and I remember it being decent enough, personally. However, I do respect the series for managing to continue getting new productions made, even if Masaki Kajishima seemingly went a bit too far with how he decided to end that original main series. Yeah, I was equally dumbfounded when I found out about that ending, too. Tenchi is something that has more than earned its spot in anime history for helping solidify the "modern" harem anime style, so I would at least recommend giving some form of it a go, if only for the novelty of it today. Congrats on that team getting the American comic adaptation re-release getting Kickstarted, though, because that is something neat to see happen. |
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merr
Posts: 515 |
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This was a great article, but can we get a part 2 on the best thing to emerge from the Tenchi Cinematic Universe—Magical Project S?
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Covnam
 Posts: 4398 |
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I don't remember what I watched first from the series, since I probably rented whatever anime the store had at the time, but the original two OVAs were among my first DVD purchases ever. I recently re-watched it on the recent bluray release and still greatly enjoyed it
Hopefully Universe gets a nice bluray release at some point as I'd love to have that on my shelf next to the OVA and Movie bluray releases (not that I'd get rid of my DVD boxset with it's great artwork!). The biggest issue with the new OVAs is that they feature a huge cast that appears in the GXP novels, which not only is not available in English (at least officially, not sure about fan translations), but is also different from the GXP anime, so you don't even have a great base even if you've seen that. Hopefully we'll one day get a proper adaptation of the GXP novels. |
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omiya
 Posts: 1948 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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Haven't seen any of Tenchi, but picked up Gekijouban Tenchi Muyo! in LOVE Original Soundtrack.
I was amused by this in the credits:
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kaiju3
Posts: 79 |
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That was just their typical snark. The authors know how massive the ecchi Japanese VHS market was in the 1990s, and the DVD one in the 2000s. Example: despite it being an adaptation of a hugely popular manga, Madhouse's Battle Angel Alita - which had to be OVA because it was way too violent for TV - failed because it wasn't nearly as ecchi or fanservicey as the audience expected. Meaning that had Madhouse ditched source material faithfulness in favor of altering her character and costume design and inserted the usual 90s "these scenes have nothing to do with plot or character and are 100% fanservice" thing, it would not have gotten cancelled on a cliffhanger after only 2 episodes. Japan never had the hostility to ecchi and fanservice that the progressive-leaning portion of the anime fandom and anime media has now, and they certainly didn't have it back then when ecchi and fanservice were commonplace in shows aimed at preteens broadcast on network TV, let alone seinen OVA. On Tenchi solidifying the modern harem anime style, I wish that were the case. First, Tenchi didn't have most of the attributes of modern harem MCs: he wasn't dense; he wasn't naive, clueless or awkward with the opposite sex; he wasn't a pervert; he wasn't a bland self-insert or wish-fulfillment vehicle. And the women weren't just a recycled collection of 20 year old tropes. They were well-written nuanced characters. Their lives didn't revolve around Tenchi and their reasons for liking him went beyond "generic nice guy who helped them out a couple of times." And no moe childishness (except from Sasami, who actually was a child), no "con" (brocon, siscon, lolicon) taboo nonsense and while yes there was plenty of fanservice - as anime had a lot more of it in general back then - it wasn't the degrading pratfall slapstick stuff that came later. And absolutely none of that "haremette on MC violence" that Ken Akamatsu inflicted on the world. If modern harems actually emulated Tenchi instead of a combination of dating sims and the much lesser harem shows that followed then the genre would be much more tolerable. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 3005 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Fair enough points, but I'd still argue that Tenchi was a blueprint for "modern" harem anime, in a general & overall sense, as it was still different enough for earlier titles that people tend to put into that overall genre, like Urusei Yatsura (though I've seen some try to call that an "anti-harem"). It's just that other works then modified said blueprint that Tenchi established, which then became the basis for later works. |
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New World Fool
Posts: 6 |
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I love Universe and I prefer it over the OVAs. I thought it was Tokyo that everyone disliked.
Ayeka and Sasami are Tenchi's aunts. So while its not siscon or brocon it's still incest. There's a lot of relations going on in that family tree. Also Sasami is pretty much all the lolicon stuff too. Especially in Pretty Sammy. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8632 Location: Penguinopolis |
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A lot of Tenchi Muyo doesn't hold up that well. The main components of Tenchi Muyo are Ryoko and Ayeka, not Tenchi himself, and the further the OVAs went, the less relevant our main heroines became. That third OVA really fucked things for good. Loli Kagato? Chibi Tokimi? Two episodes with Mihoshi's uninteresting brother? The waste of potential that was Z? The franchise went from charming, but ultimately superficial, to just superficial.
I think the Tenchi movie that holds up the best is the most controversial one, the third, that actually asks the question of why Tenchi doesn't make a choice already. Unlike the coward's way out of the OVA, he actually seems to lean more towards one choice than another by the end. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5973 |
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MFrontier
Posts: 20109 |
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Literally the first anime I ever watched!
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mdo7
 Posts: 8236 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Ah Tenchi Muyo! The one that helped popularize and modernized harem anime that we've seen today. If it wasn't for that one, I bet Love Hina wouldn't be the hit harem anime it would be today. How nice of TWIA to be talking about Tenchi Muyo.
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