Disaster Report: TENCHI IN TOKYO

AIC produced a lot of hits over the years, but few of them could compare to the success and impact of the 1992 OVA Tenchi Muyo!.  What began as merely a sitcom-inspired AU starring a minor character from Bubblegum Crisis made in part to sell Pioneer laserdiscs became a landmark in the growing genre of harem anime and an international sensation in its own right.  For AIC, it was the goose that laid golden eggs, and each new egg was a success in its own right.  One OVA soon became two, which was followed in turn by the full length TV series Tenchi Universe.  From there the franchise branched out into various films, specials, OVAs, and spinoffs.

Sadly, no anime franchise can succeed forever and Tenchi Muyo was no exception.  It has stumbled many times over the last 30 years, and many of its latter day installments would be a perfect fit for this column.  That would be a little too easy though, even for me.  I was more interested in determining the exact point where the franchise’s fortunes began to turn.  To do this, I looked all the way back to the spring of 1997 to the franchise’s second TV outing.  Making its debut alongside the likes of Pokemon,  Revolutionary Girl Utena and Slayers Try was Shin Tenchi Muyo!, better known in the US as Tenchi In Toyko Tokyo.  It may not be the absolute worst that this franchise can offer, but I would argue that it marks the point where the studio, staff, and fans alike began to fall out of love with Tenchi Muyo.

 

This show disposes with a lot of the trappings of both the OVA and Tenchi Universe and adds a number of its own ideas, creating the third branch in an increasingly convoluted continuity.  In this show, Tenchi is no longer the descendant of a runaway alien prince but instead the latest in a long line of magical earthbound warriors.  His harem came about by chance, as part of an extended chase after space pirate Ryoko (alongside her partner, mad scientist Washu) steals a mysterious energy source only to be pursued by the alien princesses Ayeka and Sasami alongside the galactic policewomen Mihoshi and Kiyone.  They all happened to crash land near Tenchi’s idyllic country home and all of them were so dazzled by his kindness and his offer of crystal-based friendship bracelets that they chose to stay, much to Tenchi’s eternal chagrin.

Tenchi In Tokyo changed more than just the backstory, though.  While comedy had always been a part of the franchise, this installment leaned more heavily upon it than ever before.  It’s chock full of big, goofy faces, zany manga-style effects, the occasional reference to other shows, and lots of slapstick and squash and stretch animation.  This is one of the most divisive elements of the show and I’m of two minds on the matter.  On one hand I appreciated the energy this style of animation brought to the show, especially after suffering through 26 episodes of the flat, dull-witted direction of Tenchi Universe.  On the other hand, this show’s sense of humor is so loud and obnoxious that it can come off as dopey and childish.  This emphasis on comedy also comes at the cost of some of the rougher, more complex edges of the main cast.  This process had already begun on Tenchi Universe, but Tenchi in Tokyo doubled down on it and then some.  The effect is not unlike making a photocopy of a photocopy, reducing what had once been an entertaining, interesting cast to its most obnoxious and tedious extremes just for the sake of a joke.

Tenchi in Tokyo makes the unusual choice to focus on its title character.  The show’s plot revolves around Tenchi leaving for Tokyo to go to high school, work on his priest training, and generally enjoy big city life.  Personally, I think this might be the show’s greatest mistake.   I’m not going to blow anybody’s mind when I state that Tenchi Misaki was, is, and shall always be a tremendous bore.  That just comes with the territory of being a leading man in a harem anime.  It’s just that it was a lot easier to forgive that when he was merely the foil to all the crazy hijinks and big personalities around him.  Once you pluck him out of that scenario, shove him into the same old high school plots we’ve seen a million times before, and demand that he carry half the show upon his scrawny shoulders, there’s no way to hide that Tenchi is basically a pile of wet cardboard with a rattail.  This series proves the translated title of the franchise truer than ever before – there really is no need for Tenchi here, especially when he's trying to be a serious romantic lead.

That’s another controversial change that Tenchi in Tokyo made: Tenchi finally made a choice when it came to his harem, and that choice was “none of the above.”  While in Tokyo, he falls for his pretty, perky classmate Sakuya.  All of the girls at Tenchi’s house are shocked to some degree by this, but Ryoko and Ayeka take it the hardest (since their endless bickering over Tenchi is one of the few bits of continuity that remains).  I can’t entirely blame them for being suspicious as I too was immediately put off with the way the show shoved Sakuya’s supposed greatness in its viewers’ faces.  Sakuya’s so cute!  Sayuka’s so popular!  Sakuya’s so talented!  Sakuya fever – catch it!  As the show goes on, it becomes clear that the viewer is meant to be suspicious of how fervently Sakuya pursues Tenchi and how seemingly little there is her life beyond him.  In the end, the tragic truth is revealed: Sakuya is nothing but a construct, an imaginary person there to serve as a wedge between Tenchi and his harem by the show’s true villain. 

The villains in the Tenchi Muyo franchise have always been kind of lackluster, and Tenchi in Tokyo might have had the weakest of them all.  For half of the series, all she does is hang around in limbo wearing the stupidest costume, playing with crystals, speaking cryptically, and sending out a trio of wanna-be Sailor Moon henchmen to sow further discord between Tenchi and his harem.  It’s not until the halfway point that we learn the villain’s name is Yugi, and true to Tenchi fashion the writers forget to explain anything else about her until the last few episodes.  It turns out that she’s a tragic little psychic experiment who was sealed away for thousands of years on Earth by Ayeka’s ancestors and now she wants revenge not just against them, but the world.  So what could bring such a diabolical person down?  Is it the magic jerk-off crystal bracelets that Tenchi gave to all the harem girls?  Is the magical sword Tenchi manifests when they’re all brought together?  Is she defeated by the space energy McGuffin that brought all the ladies to Earth in the first place?

Of course not!  It turns out that Yugi’s greatest weakness is friendship.

You see, midway through the show she disguises herself as an ordinary (if spooky) girl to spy on Tenchi and the gang, and she ends up making friends with Sasami (who seemingly has a knack for making friends with spooky kids in this franchise).  Yugi’s desire to preserve this blossoming friendship by stealing Sasami away is what triggers the final battle, and it’s her weakness towards Sasami that allows Tenchi to defeat her not with violence, but with a cooldown hug and a little speech about The Power of Friendship ™ before resetting everything back to status quo.

I wish I could convey in words just how furious this revelation made me.  The notion of a villain being merely sad and lonely instead of evil and needing only friends to mend their ways is the sort of cliché you only see in shows made for small children and possibly brown bears.  It’s a move taken straight from The Total Doofus’s Guide to Writing Hackneyed Villains.  It was a twist I jokingly called out upon her first encounter with Sasami, and I was left in despair when that prediction turned out to be all too true.  That’s when it truly sunk in for me how much the writing staff were running on fumes.  All of the story issues mentioned above were the desperation moves of writers who had exhausted all the good ideas they had for this franchise.  All they had left for Tenchi in Tokyo were lazy anime clichés and a conceit that reads like shitty Tenchi Muyo fanfiction.

Perhaps I would have been more lenient on the plot issues if the show looked any good.  Much like with Record of Lodoss War, it would be unreasonable to expect the characters and animation of Tenchi in Tokyo to maintain the same level of quality as the original Tenchi OVAs.  Tenchi Universe had managed to scale down that look while maintaining a consistent (if not particularly spectacular) quality of animation and it would have not been unreasonable to expect Tenchi in Tokyo to do the same.  Instead it would become the worst-looking entry in the entire franchise, although not for lack of ambition on the part of the production staff. 

I’ve already noted how much the show relies on broad, stretchy animation to support its jokes, but there are some decently animated action sequences as well.  When this show tries, it can look good.  The problem is that the staff here were clearly working under tight deadlines and heavy strain. Every time an episode of Tenchi in Tokyo would strive for excellence, the next episode or two afterwards paid the price.  Those episodes ended up full of off-model characters, talking heads, and close-ups of static images while others chatter off-screen.  That’s not even including the episodes where series director Nobuhiro Takamoto serves as both episode director and storyboard artist, where he once again spams the audience with split-screens in the most incompetent way possible.  In a strange inverse of what would later happen with the Lodoss War TV series, Takamoto’s episodes would be some of the most visually ambitious ones in the show’s run while Kazuta Nakazawa’s considerable talents and dual roles as chief animation director and character designer weren’t enough to save the show.  Considering that he went by an alias in the show’s credits, I suspect Nakazawa himself was not particularly proud of his work.

So where was AIC putting all of its animation effort if not into this show?  Why, into the Tenchi Muyo movies!  The first movie had been released just the year before, and Tenchi Muyo: Daughter of Darkness was released to theaters only a month or so before Tenchi in Tokyo ended.  It’s also very likely that pre-production was already underway for Tenchi Muyo in Love 2 (aka Tenchi Forever), which would be released two years later.  Every frame of these films was given all the time, money, and care that AIC could muster, and Tenchi in Tokyo ended up neglected as a result.  What’s interesting to me is that both of those films seem to take some of the larger ideas from Tenchi in Tokyo and refine upon them in better ways.  The plot of Daughter of Darkness involves a villain sending a fake girl to isolate Tenchi from his harem, while Tenchi Forever finds Ryoko and Ayeka contemplating life without Tenchi after he moves in with another woman.  It’s not a perfect explanation for these similarities (as Daughter of Darkness was based on a pre-existing light novel by a former series writer), but I can’t shake the feeling that AIC had already given up on Tenchi in Tokyo before it was complete and were all too ready to pick its ruins for scraps.

The lack of quality even bled into the show’s English dub.  Part of what made Tenchi Muyo a success in the US was the care that Pioneer put into its English dub, something that was quite rare for anime dubs of the early 90s.  You can argue how well those dubs hold up to modern ears, but at the time they were rightfully beloved.  While much of that original dub cast would be retained for Tenchi in Tokyo, there were some notable changes.  Some of these were obvious, such as bringing in Wendee Lee to take over as Kiyone or having the late Bob Pappenbrook serve double duty as both Tenchi’s father and grandfather.  Less obvious but much more important was the change in dub directors. 

Instead of sticking with Jack Fletcher (who had directed the dubs for both the original OVAs and Universe), Pioneer instead brought in Doug Stone and Dave Mallow to direct.  Stone had more experience as an actor than as a director at this point, and his biggest project to date would have been the notoriously bad dub for the Mobile Suit Gundam movie trilogy.  Mallow had more experienced as a director, but most of that experience was on a number of lesser works from Harmony Gold.  Together they produced a dub that was missing much of the nuance, personality, and comedic asides of the previous Tenchi dubs.  At times, it seems like their only direction was ‘do it louder’ because louder equaled ‘more comedy.’   There are a few actors who manage to overcome these limitations.  I rather liked Julie Maddalena’s sweet, bubbly take on Sayuka and Petrea Burchard’s performance as Ryoko is as peerless as ever, but overall one gets the feeling that even Pioneer’s US branch was getting exhausted with this franchise and couldn't give a damn about Tenchi in Tokyo.

The failure of Tenchi in Tokyo is not as obvious as some of the other shows I’ve covered in this column.  It wasn’t a commercial flop, and managed to get re-released when Funimation licensed rescued much of the franchise in the early 2010s.  It aired on Toonami in the early 2000s, right alongside those initial OVAs and Universe.  Most obviously, it did nothing to stop the franchise from chugging along.  Its failure is only noticeable in retrospect.  While there would be more Tenchi anime to come after this one, it was no longer at the fast and furious pace of the previous five years.  The creative staff had exhausted itself in every way possible, and they began to drift away to other projects and eventually other studios.

This also coincided with larger changes within the anime industry as it prepared to enter the new millennium.  OVAs were falling out of fashion, and Tenchi Muyo would soon be supplanted by Love Hina as the standard bearer for harem anime.  AIC had to change with the times, and their focus shifted away to adapting other people’s properties instead of their own.   The studio tried to change the Tenchi franchise with the times too, but audiences couldn’t be bothered with shows like Tenchi Muyo GXP, Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar, and Sasami: Magical Girls Club when there was an endless array of hornier, flashier harem shows to pick from.  It seems that the only person at the studio who still cared for Tenchi was Masaki Kajishima, who would continue to sporadically produce Tenchi OVAs over the years to an increasingly small and indifferent audience. 

Tenchi in Tokyo (and the Tenchi franchise as a whole) is a cautionary tale about what happens when a studio mines a franchise too greedily and too fast for its own good.  This practice made AIC a lot of money in the short-term, but it could not have been worth the long-term damage it did to this show, the franchise, and to the animation staff.  All that the leadership at AIC took away from this debacle was that they should try to give their other big flagship OVA the same sort of treatment at double the speed, to far more frustrating results.