A Very Pretty Sammy Sequel?!

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– I might be more excited for Megazone 23.

First of all, I was surprised to hear a Pretty Sammy sequel (of all the iterations of Tenchi Muyo!) was planned. (Not insulting Pretty Sammy, but it just wasn’t one of the more popular continuities of TM!–there were so many in the 90s–to say nothing of its good quality.)

To me, this is symptomatic of the current state of affairs at AIC, which can be interpreted in-between two extremes: they’re “desperate” in a sense (the crowdfunding aspect alone suggest that, more on that later) so they’re reaching for anything they can think of that they can attach the Tenchi brand to.

But, put another way, they’re also learning (finally). They’ve learned from Ai that there’s demand for more Tenchi (even if it’s not necessarily a “need” har har), and the OVA not having the mileage it once had, they’re trying to tap into some veins of nostalgia while falling back on a model similar to their glory days…diversify the Tenchi brand.

But speaking of glory days…I imagine this anachronistic company has also learned, again primarily via Ai in more recent years, that it’s not 1995. It’s 2018 now, if you wanna’ sell something, you can’t just keep your MO from the 1980s: we’re not buying OVAs on laserdiscs ffs. Ai was short, and each episodic installment was very, very short. As Negishi stated, this was due to the company simply not having the capital to fund anything else–like, say, an OVA–at that point, and as a business person, Toru Miura wasn’t quite sure the gamble of splurging on yet another Tenchi property–after OVA 3 and SKT aka War on Geminar–would have a big enough payoff. But, this also meant that in our screen-saturated present reality, with a jillion other things competing for people’s attention, Ai was consumable. Anyone could find five minutes out of their day to catch a quick ep. It also came out every weekday for months in a row (unlike waiting months for one installment of an OVA), which means people didn’t forget about it easily. And, thanks to some dedicated outlets (*cough cough), it was easy to find on the internet, which means it was accessible.

The other thing about Ai…it was produced in an unorthodox–non-canonical, one might say–way! Students worked on it, Takahashi City put money up in a bid for increased tourism, ergo the risk was minimized to Miura and AIC (who again, only committed with the stipulation that each episode be a very limiting 5 min a piece). The crowdsourcing on Campfire or anywhere else is, again, a sign of desperation somewhat, but it’s also a sign that they’re finally getting with the times: lots of cool stuff is made nowadays almost entirely via crowdsourcing; I’m amazed it took AIC this long to get on the bandwagon (they still need to figure out this thing called “Twitter” and social media and the internet lol, but I guess one baby step at a time).

Now, as of this post, me not being very familiar with Campfire’s policies, the funding date has come and gone and they are well below their target amount of 10,000,000 yen (I think a little over a million)…I don’t know if this means it won’t be happening, or AIC’s just going to cover the rest of it (I don’t think that’s likely, so it’ll probably be in a state of limbo, but I could be wrong), or what, BUT I think it’s cool that a spin-off originally made to capitalize on Sailor Moon’s popularity got some attention. Whether it happens or not (and I hope one day it does), it shows that AIC’s finally realizing it’s the 21st century, and the Tenchi brand still has some mileage…you just gotta’ give people something other than Kaji’s forever-expanding, convoluted family tree of a sitcom once in a while to keep them interested (and to keep AIC afloat…as Ai proved most recently, the OVA needs somebody’s coattail to ride on, after all!).

EDIT: link to the crowdfunding site.

https://camp-fire.jp/updates/26931#menu” class=”bbcode_url”>https://camp-fire.jp/updates/26931#menu