Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Back to the future.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 13, 2012

Who would have ever thought that the nineties could be quaint? The era of Clinton and Lewinsky, Newt Gingrich’s ill fated attempt to shut down the federal government, the devastating death of Princess Diana, and the cultural phenomenon of the lovely Celine Dion warbling “My Heart Will Go On” hardly seems like the stuff of potent nostalgia. And yet revisiting an “older” anime like Tenchi Muyo is an exercise in a very sweet, almost old fashioned, type of entertainment, one that will be familiar to fans of such other anime as Dragon Ball Z, with a perhaps more primitive animation style and some kind of bizarre character beats that frankly don’t always make a great deal of sense. So many anime have followed in Tenchi Muyo’s wake that have aped at least some elements of this franchise that coming to Tenchi now may seem like an exercise in derivation, but the fact is at least in some ways this enterprise came first and at least helped to introduce several salient tropes to the anime audience that have since become rather well worn clichés. I recently mentioned how the long running Bleach franchise doesn’t seem to have inspired an overly rabid fan base despite having been around for what seems like forever, but quite the opposite has happened with Tenchi Muyo, certainly one of the most ardently loved anime of all time. That may strike some people as at least a little odd, for as undeniably charming as the anime is, it doesn’t exactly leap off the screen with unbridled genius. It’s incredibly enjoyable, often quite funny and has some intriguing characters, but Tenchi Muyo, at least in this opening set of OVAs, may be best appreciated as a lovely little window into what is perhaps surprisingly a largely bygone age in the world of animation.

The hero of Tenchi Muyo! is a sweet natured if slightly mischievous young man named Tenchi Masaki. Tenchi lives with his Grandfather and helps the elderly man tend to their family shrine. The grandfather is obviously a master of some kind and has tasked Tenchi with various chores which he insists will build character in his grandson. Grandfather has also repeatedly warned Tenchi away from a padlocked cave, which of course has piqued Tenchi’s interest since it’s off limits. In a kind of funny opening scene, Grandfather reveals he has the keys to the padlock around his neck and tells Tenchi he can have them if he can get them. A crazy, if short lived, battle ensues, which results in Tenchi being pummeled and thrust through one of the paneled walls of the family home. The punch line is that he ends up with the keys grasped in his teeth.

Tenchi of course gets into the cave and discovers that a family legend about an imprisoned demon isn’t that much of a legend. His curiosity unleashes the demon, who turns out to be a rather voluptuous space alien named Ryoko. While Ryoko is happy to be free of her 700 year imprisonment, she feels that Tenchi is an appropriate surrogate for Yoshu, a long ago ancestor of Tenchi’s who was responsible for Ryoko’s predicament. Of course a battle ensues, but after Tenchi rather unexpectedly vanquishes the woman, courtesy of the remains of a sword he also found in the cave, he finds her sleeping in his bed when he gets home. That sets the middle group of OVAs in this set off on a cascading series of events where one unexpected alien female after another enters Tenchi’s life, to expectedly humorous harem results.

There’s a patently goofy aspect to these thirteen Tenchi Muyo! OVAs that makes any niggling critical concerns kind of moot. The show is unabashedly old fashioned, positing a somewhat clueless hero who (without mentioning any major spoilers for those who haven’t yet seen any installments of this long running franchise) turns out to be not exactly who even he thinks he is. And several of the supporting characters are just plain out there. Special kudos must be given to such weird little ideas as the so-called “cabbit” Ryo-Ohki. Part cat, part rabbit and part spaceship (yes, you read that right), Ryo-Ohki is a sort of mascot partner to Ryoko and is one of the most unusual (and at times funny) characters in the entire series.

It had been years since I had seen all of these original OVAs in sequence and one thing that really stood out for me this time through was how many surprises were in store, especially for a series that really doesn’t pretend to be much more than a silly exercise in some pretty innocent fan service and a fairly standard harem from outer space scenario. Several of the plot twists, which I had forgotten in the years since I first saw some of these, actually caught me completely by surprise, including a really cool one toward the end of this arc that casts Tenchi’s relationship with his Grandfather in a completely new light.

Despite the insistence of some who have deeply loved Tenchi Muyo! for twenty-odd years by this time, the series really isn’t especially innovative or groundbreaking, despite the fact that it did indeed mine several tropes which have been beaten to death in the meantime. But Tenchi Muyo! is a very sweet natured, unpretentious franchise that is long on comedy and has some delightful characters populating its kind of eccentric ambience. It may seem quaint to those of us who are now jaded with the worries of the 21st century, but that doesn’t make these OVAs any less fun to watch.

Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Tenchi Muyo! OVA Series is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.38:1. FUNimation has had a somewhat spotty record with some of these older series, and the fact that this was licensed from Universal Geneon might give videophiles further pause, but the good news is Tenchi Muyo! looks surprisingly robust in its new high definition garb. The elements are in mostly excellent shape (in some cases much better than even the refurbished Dragon Ball Z Kai releases, to give just one indication), with bright, vivid and very well saturated colors. The image is for the most part very sharp and well detailed, with precise and sharp line detail, though this is of course an older enterprise, and so has a certain painterly softness to it a lot of the time. There is occasional damage to be seen as you make your way through all thirteen OVAs, but considering the age of these installments, I for one was quite pleasantly surprised with the results.

Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Tenchi Muyo! OVA Series reverses the usual order of things by having a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix in the original Japanese and a Dolby TrueHD 2.0 mix in the English dub. Surround activity notwithstanding, these two mixes are virtually identical in terms of amplitude and the prioritization of dialogue, score and sound effects. In some ways, the English dub presents a more focused aural experience, though the Japanese track really excels in some unexpected ways, like some of the ambient environmental sounds that crop up when Tenchi visits his family shrine, to give just one example. Dialogue is very cleanly presented in both of these tracks, and the engaging music score sounds great in both as well, though my personal preference was for the 5.1 mix, which deftly spread the music through the side and rear channels.

Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Omake: Here Comes Jurai Part 2 (HD; 7:16)


• U.S. Trailer (HD; 00:51)

Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Tenchi Muyo! is just irrepressibly charming. Some may claim that it's nothing overly special, and on a certain fundamental level I'd be prone to agree, but there's such a sweetness and often hilarious aspect to these OVAs that that in and of itself becomes special. Tenchi Muyo! is kind of an odd franchise in that it first gained anime fame in this set of OVAs and only later branched out into a bona fide series and film franchise, so those wanting to find out what all the fuss has been about for so long can find no better place to jump into the wild and crazy Tenchi Muyo! universe than here, where it all started. This Blu-ray set looks surprisingly good and also sounds just fine. The supplements are awfully slight (if any franchise screams out for a retrospective featurette, this one is it), and longtime fans may lament the exclusion of the Mihoshi OVA, but otherwise this is a really solid release and comes Recommended.