For the first time ever, the lost interview from the creators of Tenchi Muyo! has been found!
You can watch the Tenchi Muyo! portion with English subtitles here.
For the original, untouched tape, you can watch here. You can also watch on archive.org.
If you’re interested in how and why this was lost, and how we found it, read below!
Part 1: (Space)ships Passing in the Night
It goes without saying that Tenchi Muyo! is a juggernaut franchise. Due to its popularity in the 90s as well as its multiple continuities, if there’s a product of any kind, you can find a Tenchi-branded version of it. From Sega Saturn soap to panty eyeglasses wipes, Tenchi Muyo! has it all. As a result, the phrase “I’ve never seen that before” gets uttered quite a bit when you’re on the hunt for something Tenchi related.
What also happens is that it is easy to miss something that you’re not looking for, because you don’t know it exists or what’s in it. Every time one searches through Japanese auction sites, you’re basically cutting your way through a dense jungle in the hopes of maybe catching a glimpse of what you’re looking for, while also catching glimpses of interesting curiosities, such as this:
PIONEER LDC – “OVA Operation Start” (OVA作戦始動)
This little black box, produced by Pioneer LDC was starting at over 100 USD. Upon closer inspection, you can see that the front pops up, and it has cardboard cutouts of Pioneer’s OVA properties as they were launching in 1992. According to the listing, the box also had a button one could press that would make voice lines play (presumably from each of the franchises featured). Green Legend Ran, Bastard!!, Kishin Corps, and Moldiver are all featured on the sides, but prominently featured in the middle was Pioneer’s bread and butter, the Zeus of their pantheon, their flagship series, Tenchi and Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo!.
For those who don’t remember or don’t happen to know, Pioneer LDC jumped into the world of Original Video Animation (or OVA) in 1992 with these properties (though Moldiver and Kishin Corps, of course would release in February and March of 1993) so this little video was more than likely a cool little showcase of what they had.
At first glance, while it is really cool, it’s not something one would immediately jump at to buy. Especially considering that the contents of the tape were unknown, the description did not offer any insight into it other than where it was from, the working condition of the box button and that it was “Not For Sale.” Which again in Tenchi fandom is not unheard of, nor does it mark something as particularly rare. For a price point so high, I just shrugged it off as a cool curiosity and continued my daily look through of aforementioned auction sites.
Part 2: A Crisis of Revelation
Because of the launch of tenchimuyowiki.com, I’ve been voraciously cataloging every piece of Tenchi media I own and any I can find in an effort to preserve Tenchi history. One night while I was working on one such project, I was looking through images and playing around in Photoshop, ripping Japanese text from images, when I inadvertently clicked the wrong button on an image I was looking at, and it popped over to this image:
This is not only the only known picture of the co-creators of Tenchi Muyo! together, but this is the only known image of Masaki Kajishima’s face. Due to Kajishima’s reclusiveness, he’s never shown his face in interviews, and only very rarely has he even done audio interviews. Everything about the man is kept at a distance from fans. The most high-quality picture of Kajishima that most fans know is from the back of his head.
I stared at the image again for the first time in a while. I’d looked at the first image of the two many times before, but on this particular night my brain clicked the right way, and I said to myself
“Wait a minute, this looks like it’s from a video…”.
If you’ve ever watched old Japanese game shows like Takeshi’s Castle or anything like that, the text is unmistakably made from video of an older time. But even with this idea buzzing around in my head, I was still at a loss. Considering how old this was, it could have been from a news report too, which if that was the case, no way would something like that have survived.
However, I wasn’t going to let this go this time, and I tracked down the source of this image: Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki Otanoshimi Ooemaki.
And there, right next to the image, was text talking about where this was from.
But wait a minute, I recognize that image above it… That’s the characters from the black box!
THAT BLACK BOX HAS THE INTERVIEW!
The title of the tape, translatable as “OVA Operation Start” was a promotional tape that Pioneer made and sent out to pitch their new line of home video products to potential customers. This box and its tape were not for sale, and unless you were lucky enough to be a Japanese Pioneer employee, or a Japanese video store owner, or be in Japan in the early 1990s, you never saw this video or its contents.
With this revelation freshly burned into my brain, I hurriedly moved back to the auction sites.
But it was nowhere to be found.
No, it can’t be…
I quickly inserted the Kanji into Google and found out that the box had finally sold… not even three weeks beforehand. It had been up every single time in the last eight months I’d checked while I was browsing for things, not knowing that the holy grail of Tenchi Muyo! interviews was on it. It even failed to sell on ebay, before finally being bought for around 10,000 yen.
To say I was devastated was an understatement.
Something like that did not come around every day. The odds of it ever showing up again were probably slim to none.
However, I didn’t give up, and then it appeared.
Part 3: Never Tell Me the Odds
After some searching, and with the help of Tenchiforum’s own Crazed, a similarly described VHS tape was found on auction sites. Unlike the black box tape, this one had a very old (but machine-made) label on it. Marked with Pioneer LDC’s logo as well as their signature LaserDisc logo, it had the exact same name with a slightly different description above.
Regardless, if what was on the tape was on the tape, the grail had been found.
And sure enough, that’s exactly what it was!
Curiously, it has a TCR time marker burned into the top of the video, meaning this could have possibly been an internal tape specifically within Pioneer. The seller also had many other promotional videos meant for stores as well. How they got this tape in their possession was not clear, but ultimately, it was the real McCoy.
While reading this, you may be thinking to yourself, “But Dagon, what makes this so rare? Why is this lost?”
Well, for one thing, this video has never appeared on any other release of Tenchi, ever. It is exclusive to these Not For Sale tapes and was not mass-produced in the way the actual episodes of the show were. The circumstances surrounding it also are probably why it never appeared anywhere else. This was made specifically to sell the idea of these properties to people. Also, as mentioned before, Kajishima doesn’t like his face being shown, and Hayashi moved on to El-Hazard after the two split up. Whether it was Kajishima, Hayashi, Pioneer, or a combination of the three, this interview stayed on this tape for 30 years exclusively, and the job it was supposed to do, sell Tenchi Muyo! to the masses, succeeded.
