Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 11, 2014

It seems like we may be at a time when a certain generation of anime fans is old enough now that the seventies and eighties seem like nostalgia. A number of older anime have been getting either released for the first time on Blu-ray or re-released, including venerated titles like Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise, Akira, Casshan and Nadia The Secret of Blue Water: Complete Collection (yes, that last one is from 1990, but it had been in development since the seventies). There’s a certain warm and cozy factor to returning to shows one viewed as a youth, but even the rose colored glasses of memory can’t always completely dispel an adult’s more jaundiced take on material that, as a grown up, may seem less than the masterpiece youthful eyes acclaimed it to be back in the day. Even some extremely rabid anime fans may not even be that aware of Time Bokan, though. While the original series was a midlevel success for Fuji TV in the mid-seventies, running for a bit over a year, it certainly didn’t make much headway past its native country until almost a decade later, when selected episodes of the series were reedited for the United States home video market under the name Timefighters. Time Bokan went on to spawn several sequels in Japan, with Yatterman running the longest (and spawning its own remake decades later). The odd thing about the Time Bokan franchise is that it’s rather loose knit. While the first series dealt whimsically with time travel, admittedly with a mecha edge, the follow-ups became a bit more rote, simply pitting dunderheaded villains against valiant heroes in weekly mecha battles. This all would seem to make Time Bokan Royal Revival a decidedly odd choice for a Blu-ray release, and yet here it is. This particular outing is a set of two brief OVAs which aired over the course of a few months in late 1993 and early 1994. The OVAs play out as a kind of on air audition for a new remake, gathering together a horde of bad guys from various Time Bokan outings to compete against each other. This will of necessity be the very definition of a niche title, but for any Time Bokan fans out there, it may bring back a pleasant memory or two.

If you were to craft an anime version built around the two inept racers played by Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk in Blake Edwards’ 1965 farce The Great Race, you might have at least an inkling of what the first episode in this set, “Ticky- Ticky Waga- Waga Boko-Boko Machine Crazy Race”, has to offer. Only in this instance, there aren’t just two stupid villains, there are several, including one who doesn’t really want to be involved due to his recent marriage. Even he is not exactly a paragon of intelligence, as is quickly displayed when he dips his arm in a boiling soup he’s fixing in his restaurant as his two former comrades attempt to convince him to join the competition.

Various groups of bad guys from the many Time Bokan iterations all end up in an arena competing against each other, each with their own extremely peculiar mecha. For example, there’s Majo, Walther and Glocky of Time Bokan with a mecha called the Gorilla Skeleton. The two persuaders seen earlier in the episode turn out to be Doronjo and Donzler of Yattaman, whose mecha is called (in a rather generic fashion) Kitchen Mecha. The third guy turns out to be named Boyakey and the announcer informs the arena audience that he couldn’t make the competition due to illness, though of course we know better.

Once the various competitors are introduced, the episode becomes a chaotic free for all, with a number of pretty over the top sight gags populating the “wacky races”, as several teams come to naught in what might be termed the anime equivalent of the big pie fight in The Great Race. Part of the problem here (maybe the biggest part) is that very few in the United States are going to be familiar enough with the characters and the shows from which they’ve been culled to get the interactions and in jokes, which leaves the episode boiling down mostly to the aforementioned sight gags, which frankly are not exactly stellar quality.

Reunion in the Tatsunoko Kingdom evidently follows a formula that Yatterman regularly utilized, with some bad guys actually trying to figure out where Tatsunoko is. This will probably be another relative head scratcher for those not that familiar with the overall Time Bokan franchise, but there may at least be some who remember Tatsunoko from an old Wii game. This episode has a few extracurricular gags (including one aimed at Sailor Moon) that even non-Time Bokan fans should get (if not necessarily appreciate), but it's another "inside job" that will definitely be an acquired taste for most.

Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Time Bokan Royal Revival is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. While coming from an earlier era, this set of OVAs doesn't really have the depth and painterly aspect of other anime from its era, though it offers a perhaps slightly more detailed world than other regular series of that time period. The show has some wonderfully distinctive characters, and it indulges in a number of whimsical styles, as I've attempted to show in some of the screenshots accompanying this review. Colors are bright, bold and very vividly saturated, and line detail remains strong through both OVAs in this set. My hunch is this may have been digitally scrubbed, for not only are the elements in surprising shape, there's not an overabundance of grain, though what's here does look reasonably organic.

Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Time Bokan Royal Revival offers DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes in English and Japanese. As seems to be the case in a lot of these releases, the Japanese mix seems slightly compressed and not quite at the same overall amplitude as the English, something that's especially apparent when music is playing or sound effects are emanating. Dialogue on both tracks is cleanly and clearly presented, and both tracks offer suitable dynamic range and very good fidelity.

Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only "extras" on this disc are trailers and disc credits, neither of which I give an official score.

Time Bokan Royal Revival Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are some shows—anime or otherwise—that you can come into "cold" and at least have a reasonable idea of what's going on. Time Bokan Royal Revival is probably not the strongest contender in that category. While I knew a lot of the jokes characters were saying were jokes, the punchlines were largely meaningless to me. What this set of OVAs has going for it is an overall manic style and some fun character designs. Mecha lovers should get a kick out of the completely peculiar robots aiding the various sets of villains. But this is a release tailored to what I suspect is a relatively small audience of Time Bokan franchise fans, and those folks should be reasonably pleased by the video and audio on display here.