For Japanese students, the education system works a little differently than it does in the rest of the world, and one of the biggest differences separating the east from the west is that in Japan, compulsory education ends with middle school. High school is largely optional, and in most cases, people have to apply to them and be accepted, rather than just heading there automatically. Given that Souchirou Nada and Bob Makihara are a pair of delinquent punks bent on surviving off of brawn rather than brain, it’s a no brainer that they’d choose Toudou Academy, a school famed for specializing in martial arts. They initially intend to take over the school through brute force alone, but their efforts quickly land them in the orbit of the Juuken club, ran by the busty Natsume sisters, and already firmly on the shit list of Enforcement Group, basically a gang-leader version of a student council. Suddenly surrounded by fighters wielding supernatural chi powers, are Souchirou and Bob hopelessly out of their depths, or have they landed exactly where fate intended?

Tenjho Tenge was produced by Madhouse at around the same time as Beck, and if that’s not setting off alarm bells in your head, it should be. Madhouse has never been a stranger to miniscule budgets, and while there are exceptions to that rule, a lot of their better looking productions were ones that found ways around their limited resources, or were directed in a way that made the shoestring budget work for them... Shows like Death Note were able to conserve their budget through constant dialogue scenes set against key frames, Trigun was able to work their cheapness into it’s comedy, several childrens’ anime used bright, appealing color palettes to distract you from the lack of movement, Beck... Okay, some titles just looked like ass, no matter how much I love them. Tenjho Tenge, unfortunately, is one of their most butt-ugly titles, but I don’t think they had much of a chance of avoiding this issue.

Tenjho Tenge uses a somewhat realistic style in it’s character designs, eschewing your typical simplistic anime faces for pronounced lips, protruding noses, cheekbones and the occasional bags under the eyes. These characters(for the most part, excluding Maya in child form) have complex facial features, along with more or less realistic body proportions and elaborate hair styles. Madhouse has done well with this design, but since Tenjho wasn’t exactly throwing around Gunslinger Girl money, it was always kind of destined to fail. These designs are mostly accurate to the manga, but they work a lot better in print than they do in motion, and that's for a few distinct reasons. First, being printed in black and white, the manga had the freedom to play around with shading, which they liberally used to enhance and highlight changes in expression. In addition, there’s always going to be disconnects between the two forms of media... For example, in manga, you can stare at a character’s expression and study every nuance of it at will with no time passing... And that’s not the case for anime.

In animation, unless you’re pausing over and over again, you feel the time pass while you’re being forced to stare at a key frame, and it just makes those unblinking faces feel more uncanny. If you’re familiar with Walmart lore(and I know I’m exposing myself here but humor me), you may remember it was once called Wal-Mart Discount City... And according to an old anecdote, Sam Walton shortened the name because of some advice he was given, that the less letters you use for your storefront, the less money you have to spend to replace them as they break over time. The same principal goes for animation... The more elaborate the design, the more you’re going to exhaust your resources by trying to stay consistent with them through the animation process. As such, there are some downright bone-chilling expressions in the manga that just look goofy and awkward in the anime, and they often do not lend themselves well to complex motion. It’s also worth mentioning that there are some goofy hairstyles that look straight out of Shiki. Maya gets called a cockroach at one point because of her massive hair antennas... I said it first, thank you very much... And the main antagonist, at least in the modern timeline, has bangs that make him look like a parody of Gordon Ramsay.

As for the motion itself, it’s extremely stilted and janky, and while most of the time it looks like the producers were TRYING to conserve money intelligently and use budget saving tactics just enough to make the final product more appealing, that’s just in the show’s downtime. When there’s an action scene going on, all bets are off and they can’t help but expose just how little cash they had to work with. They use every shortcut in the book to try and make the numerous fight scenes look at least passable, and if you’re not familiar with how these shortcuts usually work, they MIGHT be able to fool you? If you’ve ever seen a still image just shake like a polaroid picture being held by someone going through heroin withdrawal, or if you’ve seen an action shot accompanied by a series of lines on either side to the tune of a dramatic music sting, you’ve seen at least half the action in this series. They also make liberal use of cutaways, limited motion shots, and while I’d normally be able to ignore this kind of cheapness in any other anime, the art design does not mix well with it, and while this is more the fault of time than anything else, the archaic aspect ratio does it NO favors.

Well the series may look bad, but at least the music is cool. If there’s anything about this show that’s stood the test of time, it’s the opening, Bomb A Head by m.c.A.T. Even Clannad gave it a nod for how awesome it was, although since the character who liked it was Sunohara, I don’t know if that’s actually a compliment. The song is pumped up and enthusiastic as the singer transitions effortlessly between rapping and a surprisingly tender falsetto, and lord have mercy, there’s a couple of breakdancing shots featuring Bob and Aya that make for some share-worthy gifs if I do say so myself. The soundtrack by Yasunori Iwasaki is also some pretty catchy stuff, mixing classic instruments like intense drumming percussion beats and Japanese flutes with more modern synth sounds to pulse-racing effect. That, or he just mixes synth tunes like a musical alchemist, showing just how much musical range a computer can have, even about a decade before the dawn of dubstep.

The English dub is kind of a mixed bag. On the high end you have Steve Staley and Wendee Lee, both veterans of the business, and they both came in swinging, nailing their characters right off the bat. For Wendee Lee this essentially means playing two characters... Or, alternatively, the same character in two different ways, but hey, this is Wendee Lee we're talking about. Stephanie Sheh and Johnny Yong Bosch take a little while to settle into their roles, as Sheh starts off playing Aya kind of screechy and shrill for the first few episodes before finding the right delivery and staying there for the rest of the series, and Bosch kind of just plays good boy Masataka Takayanagi as yet another basic Johnny Yong Bosch character, the same one you’ve heard a million times before, up until he grasps the nuances of his role and his veteran expertise takes over. The one sour note in the main cast is Jamieson Prince as Bob, an old white guy playing one of a very small number of black characters in the entire medium, and while there’s an obvious ethical issue at play, he just can not escape sounding like an old white guy, and it’s distracting as hell. Still, they had the good sense to rewrite a disquietingly ignorant line Maya had ABOUT black people, so some parts age better than others, I guess? It's a fine enough dub, lots of classic names attached, just throw an asterisk on there.

If I were to ask you to name an action comedy anime from around the turn of the century that took place at a high school, featured over-the-top bombastic fight scenes were people survived the impossible on a regular basis, featured cheap and badly dated animation and prominently featured Wendee Lee, what’s the first thing that would come to mind? Well, if you’re especially cultured and you wanted to impress me, you MIGHT say Tenjho Tenge, but you probably thought the same thing everyone else thought... A slightly older series called Great Teacher Onizuka. And fair play, the two shows do have several striking similarities, most notably the ones I just mentioned, but if there’s one area where they differ, it’s longevity. GTO has successfully stood the test of time, while Tenjho Tenge has failed to do the same, but why is that? What is it that makes one stick in your mind, and the other fade from it? Well, I feel like what puts GTO on a slightly higher pedestal is it’s fish-out-of-water approach to story-telling. Onizuka is a larger than life character, but more importantly, he’s weird. He’s an anomaly, and the reason he stands out so much to us is because he stands out in his world. His interactions are almost exclusively with people who are physically normal, at least by anime standards, and they have to deal with the bullshit physics he lives by on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, Tenjho Tenge takes place in a world full of Onizukas. If it wasn’t for the fact that he HAS his own backstory spin-off manga, I would be quick to assume he stepped right out of one anime and into another, with that first anime being Tenjho Tenge. The problem with this is, the fish out of water dynamic is missing from this show. Tenjho Tenge does not have normal people in it’s cast... From the minute the first episode ends, we’re dropped directly into a pen full of weird ideas and bizarre characters in what looks, from the outset, to be an otherwise normal high school setting. In this world, underage students are left to their own devices, beating the crap out of each other on a regular basis with no adults around to exercise any degree of control over them. It’s a world where tackling a naked girl, even by accident, means you’re engaged to her. It’s a world where students just have unexplained supernatural powers, and while they may earn a round of surprised gasps now and then, they’re just treated like a normal everyday thing.

Essentially, this is an alien world, but it looks just enough like our own modern day world to cause confusion at the way it operates. Yes, several of these weird details are later explained, but saying Tenjho Tenge starts you off in the deep end would be putting it mildly. This could have easily been resolved with the use of a cypher character... A normal person to use as a fish-out-of-water so she could give all this weird shit the appropriately shocked reaction it deserves, and even act as the audience surrogate so things could be handily explained to her... But we don’t get that, which leaves the viewer out in the dark for way too long. This wouldn’t be a problem if the series was a straight up screwball comedy, and yes, Tenjho Tenge does have some comedic elements, even the occasional good joke, but it’s honestly surprising just how seriously it takes itself, all while whole-heartedly expecting the same from you. Unfortunately, because I don’t have that filter of a cypher character, and all this randomness is supposed to be taken at face value right off the bat, I can’t help but ask a few potentially inconvenient questions.

Since the bulk of those questions fall under the same umbrella, I guess I’ll start with the big one... Why does this story take place at a school? How does that setting serve the plot at all? Watching extreme violence play out on a high school campus is disturbing enough, especially when characters are doling out life threatening injuries to each other and not one adult steps in to stop them, but even putting all that aside, what purpose does a martial arts high school serve? I know it’s revealed later that the people running it are trying to breed the ultimate martial artist from the student body, but like... Why? World domination? Pure human curiosity? And what does anybody expect to get out of this school? Remember, high school i Japan is non-compulsory, it’s not like this school is some kind of alternative to a boring school life. Graduating middle school and just joining a gang is a valid option in comparison, and it would probably have more immediately satisfying results. Is there some kind of college that’s just handing out martial arts scholarships? This show has as much business taking place on a school campus as Pitch Perfect does.

As an alternative, consider this: Souchirou and Bob are twenty something dropouts, living together in an apartment with Bob’s girlfriend as she supports them financially, and they’re trying to find a job that they don’t get immediately fired from. On their way home from another failed opportunity, they’re accosted by thugs, and with the help of the Natsume sisters, they fight them off, but this chance encounter leads them to a seedy underground fight club where not only are they able to thrive, but it turns out people down here have supernatural powers... And Souchirou finds out he has latent abilities of his own. See, the entire story... Literally, the ENTIRE story... Fits this prompt, and by taking away the high school setting and aging up the characters, there’s nowhere near as many awkward questions bogging everything down. I mean yeah, it’s still a fantasy concept, but your suspension of disbelief doesn’t have to stretch nearly as far as it did with the series proper. Why don’t the police ever get involved with anything? Oh, because the people running the club have the cops on payroll. Why doesn’t the champ go to a hospital and get surgery to correct his heart problems that will soon become fatal? Because he’s a wanted criminal. Who cleans up all the property damage? What are people fighting for? Why does the outside world fail to acknowledge physical manifestations of chi? All easily explained, unlike in the actual series.

Of course, that wouldn’t likely solve one of the show’s other glaring issues... Tenjho Tenge just isn’t all that interesting. I’m assuming most people who like this show like it for the action and fanservice, but the manga does both of those things about a million times better. Like I said earlier, the motion on screen pales in comparison to the way the implied motion between panels teases your imagination into filling in the blanks, making for far more enjoyable fight scenes. If it’s boobs you want, hey, the manga is actually uncensored. Me personally, the last time I watched this show was around ten years ago, and you want to know how much I remembered going into this rewatch? I remembered Maya because of her changing forms, I mean how could I not, that’s the most iconic imagery of the series. I remembered Aya from all the controversy over how the first manga release censored her nudity with a drawn-on bra that looked about as convincing as he digital bikinis from Tenchi Muyo. I remembered Bob because let’s be honest, black anime characters are kind of rare. I remembered the bad guy punching a bull to death, I remembered there were some long-ass flashbacks, and I remembered the story cutting off abruptly unfinished, and that’s it.

Interesting note, going into this rewatch, I heard there was a sequel OVA, so I thought “Oh, okay, they actually wrapped up the story!” Turns out no, the OVA was part of what I watched previously. This anime really does just end, with several plot threads left dangling, several arcs unfinished, bowing out with a sequel-bait cliffhanger that never happened, and they did this after wasting nearly half the season’s run time on extended flashbacks which, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, are far more entertaining and well-written than the parts taking place in the present. In the flashbacks, you have characters whose motivations extend beyond ‘I wanna be stronger’ and ‘I don’t wanna let you become stronger.’ And yes, I know there’s a bit more nuance to the plot of this show than that, but you know what? Not by fucking much. The main character of this series, Souchirou, never even meets the predominant villain of the series, who only exists in the flashbacks. How the fuck does a problem like THAT manage to get past the editors without warranting a massive fucking rewrite?

If I’m going to give this series the benefit of the doubt on anything, it’s that at least to me, it doesn’t feel like anybody was half-assing this production. Tenjho Tenge reeks of genuine effort, like the people behind it wanted not only to live up to a source material that they clearly enjoyed and respected, but to make an anime out of it that WOULD stand the test of time like Great Teacher Onizuka before it. Again, that’s purely speculation on my part, but I don’t think the failings of this show were in any way due to negligence. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that the production was plagued by budget issues, and it’s also very possible that they just didn’t know how to translate the material to a new medium. The thing is, right in the final episode, after the final flashback ends, this show changes it’s tone dramatically at the drop of the hat. For the latter half of the final episode, and then extending into the entire OVA finale, Tenjho Tenge drops all of it’s pretense and sense of self-importance, and it just starts to deliver the kind of dumb, energetic fun that it arguably should have delivered from the start. Like the flame that burns brightest right before going out, Tenjho Tenge showed us the kind of anime it always had the potential to be, right before it’s untimely ending.

Tenjho Tenge is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Diskotek Media. The two episode OVA I mentioned before is included in the set. There’s a movie, I don’t think it’s available in the states, but from what I can tell it’s another one of those ‘condense and summarize the series” types of movies, and those are always worthless. The original manga is available in uncensored Full Contact edition from Viz Media, although certain volumes are scarce in physical form.

Tenjho Tenge is an anime that I wanted to love. I mean, with an opening that cool, how could I not? Unfortunately, that opening is really the only worthwhile thing it contributed to the otaku landscape. I’ve questioned why a lot of anime haven’t been reviewed yet on Anilist, but it’s fairly easy to see that this one is a relic of the past that fell off the map for a pretty good reason. I’ve only read a couple volumes of the manga myself, so I don’t know how much deeper the characters were supposed to get(if at all) or where all of this unfocused martial arts drama was leading, and although I’d be happy to give a second season a fair shot, the series as it stands falls short in just about every non-musical category. I liked the flashback segments, but the as for the rest, I had a difficult time retaining interest in it, and I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to recommend it to anyone.

I give Tenjho Tenge a 4/10.