All things considered, Tenchi Masaki leads a pretty boring life... Splitting his time between living in the city with his father to attend school, and visiting his grandfather’s shrine out in the country to train for Shinto priesthood, he had little time for any other entertainment. His one fascination, which he carried all the way from his childhood, was a mysterious cave located near the shrine. For as long as he could remember, the mouth of the cave was blocked by iron bars... According to his grandfather, this was because an ancient, powerful demon was locked away within its depths. Being a curious young adolescent with nothing else to do, Tenchi finally managed to outwit his grandfather and unlock the cave, awakening a centuries old intergalactic terror named Ryoko, and this one chance encounter would change Tenchi’s life forever, as well as altering the destinies of many others. Her revival would start a chain reaction of strange encounters for the young Tenchi, as he would wind up sharing his home not only with Ryoko, but with a demure space princess named Ayeka, her little sister Sasami, a dim-witted Galaxy Police officer named Mihoshi, and more. Will Tenchi Masaki come to regret his decision to explore the forbidden cave, or will the results actually turn out to be more blessing than curse?
With the original Tenchi OVA, we’re going back to our old friend Studio AIC, a company that’s been producing anime since 1987, and with this OVA coming out in the early nineties, that is some promising news. The nineties really were AIC’s heyday, and while they did sort of fall off during that awkward period in the Anime medium where everybody was transitioning from cell painting and hand drawn animation to digital work, they did eventually pick up steam and catch up to the rest of the field in the 2010’s... Right up until their demise in 2014. I guess it’s like the old saying goes, the flame burns brightest right before it goes out. I’m glad they were able to stick it out long enough to produce some amazing content like Kotoura-san, Humanity has Declined and the weird-as-fuck Ebiten, but in the nineties, AIC were one of the original kings of Japanese animation, and the one franchise that stuck with them throughout their entire existence was their flagship title, Tenchi Muyo.
Tenchi Muyo was originally conceived by Masaki Kajishima and Hiroki Hayashi while they were working on another OVA entitled Bubblegum Crisis. As silly and over the top as that particular title may sound, the actual series was anything but, and after a while, both men were starting to get tired of how serious and gloomy the project was getting, so they started pitching some more lighthearted ideas to bring some levity into the story, but their ideas kept getting shot down by sponsors who were bending the studio’s ear. It wasn’t until later that they were able to put all of their weird ideas together. While one could make an argument for Ranma 1/2 at least partially inventing the concept of a single male protagonist surrounded by potential love interests, Tenchi Muyo could also be seen as the prototypical harem anime, as Masaki and Hiroki’s original concept revolved around bringing this idea to life. They loosely based Tenchi on some supporting character from Bubblegum Crisis, and Ryoko on the title character from I Dream of Jeannie(no, really,) and filled up the rest of the pitch with fanservice, silly sci-fi hijinks, and a cast of interconnected original characters to be revealed throughout the OVA.
I mentioned earlier that AIC were an industry giant in the nineties, and true to form, Tenchi looks about as good as you could reasonably expect an anime from the time to look. The character animation is somewhat inconsistent, ranging from stiff to graceful in a way that suggests that not every volume of the OVA had the same level of care and financial resources poured into it. In spite of this, the series is well-directed throughout(at least for this season) and while there are obvious technical limitations, they're rarely ever seriously distracting. The backgrounds are intricate and full of detail on a level that you might not consciously notice, but that creates a deep yet subtle sense of immersion. Looking past the characters in any given scene, the environments are lush and articulate... The wood inside of an old house looks old, yet well cared for, as it would be. The trees in the far background might look like water-paint, but when Tenchi is in the garden, the dirt surrounding him and clinging to the vegetables he’s picking don’t just look like grayish-brown paint, it looks relatively real.
There’s a shot in episode three where Princess Ayeka is looking out of a window, we see her from outside the glass, and there’s an incredibly realistic half-opaque reflection of the outside covering the bottom of the glass. They didn’t need to include that. What this sort of excess tells me is that with the looser release schedule of an episodic OVA, as compared to a TV series, the creators were able to be creative, and had more time to flesh out their ideas, and it shows especially in the character designs. You don’t come up with a cat/rabbit hybrid animal that hatches from the egg of a destroyed spaceship only to later transform into a new spaceship if you’re not having fun at your job. Yes, a spoiler, but it’s a small one. The designs look fairly generic on earth, with the only weird looker being this large classmate of Tenchi’s with a strawberry for a nose who shows up for five seconds in one episode, but aside from him, the normal Japanese designs contrast well against the sci-fi designs of space-faring characters, whose outfits and hairstyles look alien, but not over-the-top to the point that they become unbelievable.
I don’t know where else to put this, but if you have epilepsy or are prone to seizures, skip the opening. I’m not kidding, I have no visual disabilities myself, but those flashing colors even made ME slightly uncomfortable.
The English dub was an early Pioneer/Geneon effort, so there are a lot of names in the cast that may not be familiar to modern anime fans, as a shocking amount of the individuals in question haven’t done anything since the turn of the century, except in some cases where they came out of retirement for the most recent Tenchi project in 2018. Matt Miller voiced Tenchi, and pretty much nothing else throughout his voice acting career, as his main trade has always been stage acting. He plays the character in a way that feels like he was trying to recreate the Japanese performance in English, which feels artificial at first, but he settles into it pretty quickly. Actually, this is pretty much the case for most of the cast... Jennifer Darling acted in fairly obscure cartoons from the early eighties to the late 2000s, with Princess Ayeka being probably her biggest character, and while she sounds kind of shrill at first, her aristocratic cadence does smooth out over time. Debi Derryberry is the most prolific actor in the cast, also the only one still working today, but since she only plays the little cabbit Ryo-Ohki, I’ve gotta say the best performance in the show is Petrea Burchard, who seems to figure out her character a lot faster than anybody else did. Which is good, because like Miller, she didn’t really do a lot of anime roles other than Ryoko. It’s an okay dub for the time, and a fascinating time capsule of classic voice actors, but I still wouldn’t fault you for picking the sub.
From the way I described it earlier, Tenchi Muyo might sound like it has a pretty unique origin story. Tenchi began its life as the original concept of an established creator who felt inspired, and wanted to create a new anime from the ground up, and it turned into a multimedia project that would go on to far exceed his wildest ambitions. The truth is, though, I’ve reviewed two similar anime before. Strike Witches was born from a notebook full of sketches of anthropomorphic fighter jet waifus, and Battle Athletes was born from the desire to create a sci-fi olympics story that could capitalize financially off of the popularity of that year’s Japanese hosted olympics. Like Tenchi, these franchises were all entirely original, with no prior source material to go off of; They were highly experimental, born from the creative minds behind them, and they were all really weird. Out of the three of them, it’s impossible to deny that while they all survived longer than anyone could have predicted(for better or worse), Tenchi Muyo was by far the most successful of the three.
Not only did the Tenchi franchise put out more content than the other two, but it’s also far more recognizable, which likely has to do not only with just how many iterations it’s had over the decades, but the fact that for anyone who grew up in the nineties with early Toonami, this show is a staple of their childhoods. For a lot of us, Tenchi was proof that anime could be much more than just the shonen action anime and children’s collect-a-thon shows that we were getting on TV at the time. Yeah, Cartoon Network may have censored it, getting rid of all the blood and covering up the nudity with the now infamous digital bikinis, but the concept of a harem anime was still just as fresh to the west as it was to Japan, and the touch of sci-fi action didn’t hurt either. For all of its flaws, and trust me we’ll get there, Tenchi was honestly kind of mind-blowing, and for a show that had to exist on the same block as Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, it never faded into the background, and that’s saying a lot.
As humble as its origins may have been, Tenchi has left behind a powerful legacy. Sure, Strike Witches may have had a ton of spin-offs, sequels and rip-offs, but it still pales in comparison to the title that launched not only a franchise, but an entire genre into the zeitgeist. I feel like the harem genre would have eventually happened regardless of whether or not Tenchi existed, but that is the timeline we’re on, and Tenchi is where it all started... But one thing we need to ask in spite of that is, so what? Being the first at something doesn’t always make you the best at it. This is especially important because while brilliance can come from anywhere, it’s fair to say that nine times out of ten, harem anime kind of suck. Looking at Tenchi Muyo objectively, on its own merits, with a grain of salt added for the time period it aired in, is it a good enough series to the point where it can be praised beyond its contributions to the anime medium as a whole? Is this show worth revisiting, in the year of our lord 2023?
Well first off, it needs to be said that you don’t actually have to go back to this OVA to appreciate the rest of the franchise. Tenchi Muyo is different from other long running IPs in the fact that each individual title, with some exceptions, are designed to exist on their own as alternate universe takes on the characters and the world they live in. The OVA does have four separate seasons that are meant to be watched continuously, but you could also skip all of that and just watch Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo or most of the smaller spin-offs. The Tenchi OVA isn’t required for your enjoyment of the franchise, and on its own, honestly, it’s kind of a mixed bag. First off, it does feel like the creators were a little too excited to get all of their ideas out, and as a result, it doesn’t feel like they really knew what kind of story they wanted to tell when they put out the first two episodes, as both contain a lot of plot crammed in all at once, and the characters involved feel just slightly out of character compared to how they would act later on.
This is in addition to several glaring plot holes where you can just tell they had to come up with some idea on the spot to move the story forward, and they didn’t think too hard about how their ideas would conflict with pre-established lore. Think the first two seasons of RWBY... Ideas thrown out at random, rule of cool, never stop moving forward because if you look back you might realize something you’ve written doesn’t make any sense. Like, when Tenchi releases Ryoko, she goes on a rampage and tries to kill him... Even though in a flashback a few episodes later, we see a flashback of her spirit hanging out at the mouth of the cave watching him grow up, genuinely feeling warmth and affection for him. Like the first two seasons of RWBY, however, these conflicting and poorly thought out plot points and lore details have one very positive trade-off, that being a constant vibe of inspiration and creativity, and at some points even genuine unpredictability. Sure, you’re making things up as you go along, and the results may be sloppy, but damn it if it doesn’t make for a fun ride sometimes.
As a harem anime, it does fall into one of the more prevalent traps of the genre, that being the sad old cliche of a boring male protagonist. I’m not going to pretend like Tenchi Masaki doesn’t have his badass moments, especially in the last couple of episodes, and he’s not unlikeable by any means, but aside from that, you know how this goes... He’s a bland self-insert character with little to no defining traits, whose agency throughout the story is driven either by morals or by the plot, and of course he’s the unwilling target of all the female characters’ affections, because like every harem ever, the women have overactive libidos and the guy has none. Well, none of that is untrue, but it is toned down compared to most of the shows that would come later. True, Tenchi has three women in love with him by the end of the season, but none of them are openly competing for him, making any grand overtures, or getting uncomfortably aggressive with him. There is an entire subplot revolving around incestuous marriage, but the less said about that, the better.
On the other hand, the members of his prototypical harem are the exact opposite of him. While Tenchi himself is a bit on the bland side, the female side of the cast is a lot more complex and interesting... Well, with the exception of Sasami, who doesn’t really serve a purpose plotwise, and won’t really develop as a character until future installments of the series. Tenchi’s other four love interests all have definitive personalities and backstories, and while you could argue they inspired the kind of repetitive harem cliches that we keep seeing today, there’s so much more to them than that. Ryoko is more than just the overly forward and shameless girl, her attraction to Tenchi acts as an element of vulnerability to contrast with her identity as a powerful force of destruction. Ayeka isn’t just your spoiled rich girl who’s desperate to marry the protagonist, she’s dealing with the fact that she spent centuries searching for someone she already lost. Both characters are attracted to Tenchi for believable reasons, both in the main story and regarding their backstories, and their personalities are designed in a way that makes them perfect foils for each other, with both their bickering and their bonding feeling natural and organic.
Mihoshi and Washu aren’t given a ton of development this particular season, but you can tell a lot about who they are and what kind of lives they lead as soon as they’re introduced in the story, and hell, even though the villain in the final third of the season DOES come right the fuck out of nowhere, even he manages to be really cool and memorable. There’s a principle in writing that if you can swap characters’ dialogue word-for-word without creating any noticeable change, you’ve done a bad job writing your characters. Tenchi Muto only very rarely fails this test with some of Tenchi’s dialogue, and that’s not a bad ratio at all. With the exception of Mihoshi’s occasional clumsiness, the bulk of Tenchi Muyo’s comedy is derived from interactions between these characters, rather than just silly hijinks or cringey slapstick, and while the dynamic between Ryoko and Ayeka may be the strongest part of this, when the writers are at their strongest, any two characters can be thrown together for some kind of comedic effect at any given time. I was honestly surprised by just how funny and charming Mihoshi was, because I remembered her more strongly from Tenchi Universe, where she did get flanderized a bit. Hell, I was surprised how much fun I had with this show in general, after not having seen it for almost twenty years. The main character may have been a bit weak, but like the actual translation of Tenchi Muyo tells us, there’s no need for Tenchi.
The original Tenchi Muyo DVD set is unfortunately out of print, and has never been rescued or rereleased, despite the most recent release War on Geminar being released a few years ago. Pretty much every iteration of the series was available at some point, but as far as I can tell, the only ones that ever saw a second release were the ones that Funimation added to their S.A.V.E collection back in the day. They are available for streaming on certain platforms like Amazon Prime, and I personally bought the series on my Xbox Series X during a massive anime sale to watch it for this review.
When I started this review, I had two goals in mind; I wanted to revisit a nostalgic anime from my past, and I wanted to find out if the original Tenchi Muyo OVA was still worth watching in a market that’s been over-saturated with both harem anime clones, and more worryingly, a metric fuckton of Tenchi sequels, spin-offs and reboots. As it turns out, not only is it worth watching, it’s still pretty damn fun. As a matter of fact, it’s probably one of the better Tenchi properties, as it’s vastly superior to its four direct sequels, and the series just hasn’t looked right ever since the industry moved on to digital painting. Modern Tenchi just looks wrong from any angle. Tenchi Universe is still my personal favorite, but I enjoyed watching this first OVA again, and I would not complain about rewatching it again in the future. It has it’s flaws, and it went through a lot of growing pains, mainly due to the creators not knowing what they wanted it to be right away, and I can’t honestly say it comes together in the end like it should, but considering the circumstances of its birth and the anime empire it was laying the groundwork for, it’s forgivable enough to be worth a recommendation.
I give Tenchi Muyo a 6/10.
9.5 out of 12 users liked this review
