I've had an unofficial "anime" category on this site for a long time, but never really did anything with it other than write about the influence of Project A-Ko. I don't know if I would call myself a "super otaku" or anything, since I know people much more into the anime scene than myself, but I have had at least two anime in my show rotation for the past 15 years and I've even self taught myself enough Japanese to read manga off Pixiv, so I'm not really a casual fan either. So why no discussion on anime? The issue is that unlike with, say, RPGs, it's hard to find a nice topic for the length of essays on myself. I can certainly say that I like things like Gundam, Patlabor, Lain, Joshiraku, Steins;Gate, etc. and this is certanly true. But that's one sentence. But by the time I start going deep into character profiles, episodes summaries, etc. I might as well make a dedicated fansite just to a series, which I don't really want to do now. So I watch anime, but usually do not talk about it here.
Anyway, recently I've been thinking of Tenchi Muyo a lot. Maybe it's the bouncing Ryo-Ohki on the front page, I don't know, but it always seems come up again and again even if I don't actually rewatch the series that often. In fact, going through myh image directory I came across this image I made to mock new vs. old software design (with Winamp as the test case):
And yeah, I do primarily use that Kiyone skin for Winamp, though I also have an Inuyasha and Chrono Trigger skin that I like. In any case, Tenchi is a franchise that I can talk a lot about, both on a personal and general level without needing a full-fledged encyclopedia. So let's get into it.
On a personal level, Tenchi Muyo in some ways feels like the first "anime" anime I saw. I had seen others before it, including a lot of Dragonball Z, Gundam Wing and the first four episodes of Robotech. However I could classify these as "cartoons", while Tenchi Muyo felt both aggressively Japanese and aggresively "animesque" in aesthetic. It also helped that it didn't have the same popularity among my friends as Gundam Wing or Dragonball Z, which lent it a kind of "underground" feeling to it, despite appearing on Toonami. The fact that the title was in Japanese without a translation didn't hurt.
While Tenchi Muyo is most remembered as a "harem anime" I will always remember it as an adventure story. Tenchi gets wrapped up in an adventure bigger than he could have prepared for, and the show continually introduces larger than life concepts, especially in the first two OVAs (which I will always consider the "true" Tenchi property.) The slice of life moments only enhance the stakes of the adventure. It was like the dreams of youth in animated form, with many of the songs explicitly bringing up those themes. Those songs have some of the best English adapations I've ever seen in anime, to the point where I imported a CD from Japan to listen to them in English.
As a kid, the lyrics to "I'm A Pioneer" got me wishing for an adventure of my own. I remember talking with someone in high school about how all these adventurers got started at 17 or 18. Maybe I would "open the window and catch the wind one night" to "sail with the birds in their flight." Now I don't regret my life, but obviously I didn't go on a cosmic adventure or anything. So now when I go back and listen to the same songs it reminds me of the dreams of youth, so the feeling is more wistful.
This is even more the case now that the original 2 Tenchi OVAs are practically lost treasures themselves. I still don't understand the exact reasons why, but there was some sort of rights SNAFU where Funimation got the rights to most of Tenchi but NOT the first two OVAs. This got to the absurd point where Funimation released several collections labeled things like "The Complete OVA series" or "The Perfect Tenchi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki! Collection", but (with one exception) these would start from OVA 3. The back of the box would even say something like "Tenchi, Ryoko, Ayeka and the others return!" though someone unfamiliar with the series probably wouldn't realize the problem until after they started watching. Later works like Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo, etc. fared better, but even those are much harder to come by after Crunchyroll (i.e. Sony) bought out Funimation. I'm pretty sure that Sony actually has the rights to show everything Tenchi Muyo related (maybe there's some problem with the old dubs, but I'm sure that with a franchise as niche as Tenchi has become no one would care to have an JP only release.) But of course most of this stuff doesn't even appear on Crunchyroll. At the time of this writing the only thing available on Crunchyroll is Ai Tenchi Muyo and the OVA, starting from season 4 for some reason even though there were never any rights problems with the third OVA. Tenchi Universe had previously been available on Funimation's site and in many DVD releases, but now is available only through Apple TV for some bizarre reason. Everything should be easily available, but it isn't. That gets to another rant; in fact I did touch on that here.
Regardless of how idiotic the situation is, the end result is that Tenchi, especially the first two Ryo-Ohki OVAs, is something that only exists in hazy childhood memories, unless you really dig for things. As much as I am annoyed by how artificial the scarcity is, on another hand it does feel strangely appropriate. At the time of this writing, the top comment on this youtube upload of "Dimension of Love" is "It's been nearly 30 years and I'm still waiting for that carnival to come back." (In reference to the line from the final epsiode "if you wait long enough, [the carnival] will always come back to you.") We've had plenty of other Tenchi shows in those three decades, but none of them hit the same magic that was so strong in the first two OVAs and still tangible in Universe (even if it was a bit less there.) The shows really did go down in quality, becoming more bland and "franchise-y". But somehow more than that the early works captured the magic of an adolescence that you never can quite get back, though you'd like to. So in many ways what Tenchi fans are waiting for is not really the show itself, but the magic of 90's anime.
Maybe it's a bit self-indulgent, but it does make me wonder how a Tenchi series go where Tenchi had lived a mundane life for years, only to get dragged back into the galactic carnival in his middle aged years.
Of course I know that the past is the past and doesn't come back. Even if it does repeat, it's never the same the second time. But one of the categories of this site is "nostalgia", so I'm allowed to be wistful.
I said at the beginning of the essay that there were a variety of reasons why Tenchi keeps coming up in my mind. One of the most immediate is that there are many sites where fans of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya are upset about how the show is basically unknown among new anime fans. It really was "the" show of the 00's. I never watched it but I couldn't escape knowledge of its characters, setting, basic plot, etc. as someone who was watching anime in the 00's. The nostalgia for Haruhi probably intersects nostalgia for the late 00's internet, since it certainly was everywhere there at all otaku or weeb adjacent. If nothing else, you had Hare Hare Yukai, which for me will live on due to its 2nd place in the immortal Nico Nico Douga Kumikyoku. So in a sense I can understand why 00's weebs are shocked that Haruhi has disappeared. But on the other hand, I feel like it's fading is inevitable like what happened to Tenchi. Maybe Tenchi wasn't as mainstream as something like Dragonball, but it was certainly huge online and in the convention circuit during the 90's and early 00's. If you had asked a western anime fan to name 20 series, one of the Tenchi shows would have been included. But now it is barely known at all. Of course, Haruhi didn't get screwed over as much by the distribution as Tenchi did, but I doubt that Tenchi Muyo Ryo-Ohki would be as known as something like Dragonball even if it had been kept in print in the west. On the flip side, I barely knew a thing about Project A-Ko, despite Project A-Ko VHS's still being very much available when I started watching anime. It was the show of the 80's, but that was before my time.
So we might view Project A-ko, Tenchi Muyo and Haruhi as "nostalgia shows." Not that they themselves thrive on nostalgia, but because they set up something that you end up being very nostalgic for. There's something different about the feeling I get for Tenchi when compared to shows like Dragonball or Gundam Wing, or for that matter western works like Star Wars or Star Trek: The Next Generation, despite me actually being a much bigger fan of all the latter works than Tenchi at the time. I think that it might be that when I look back on the early Tenchi OVAs and Tenchi Universe it's impossible for me to think of them without thinking "ah, that was the 90's" in much the same way that Project A-Ko embodies 80's anime fandom and Haruhi embodies 00's anime fandom. In contrast when I go back to something like Gundam Wing or Star Wars they obviously come from a previous era, but they don't feel so inexorably tied to it. It's hard to pin down exactly what I mean, but I think anyone who watched Tenchi in the 90's feels this way, and the feeling is probably similar for people who watched Project A-Ko in the 80's or Haruhi in the 00's. It makes wonder if there is a show like that for the 10's or especially the 20's. I don't think it's enough to be popular, like My Hero Academia. I don't have the same feeling about Dragonball, for example, even though I definitely can remember loving it in my youth. It's just a franchise, but it doesn't really capture my hopes and dreams. Maybe what I'm getting at is too ephemeral to really quantify, meaning that only kids getting into anime now will be able to tell, and someone older like me isn't qualified to judge new series. But I do wonder.
Not much of a main theme or conclusion I know, but the title is "Musings on Tenchi Muyo." Just musings. You got what you were promised.
I am still waiting for that carnival to come back though...
May 27, 2026