Time Bokan: Royal Revival OVA episode 1

In 1993, Tatsunoko Production produced and released a two episode OVA called "Time Bokan: Royal Revival". Time Bokan was a franchise of (at the time) seven shows starting in the 1970s and running to the mid 80s: Time Bokan, Yatterman, Zenderman, Rescueman, Yatodetaman, Ippatsuman, and Itadakiman.

Each show followed a similar format: The hero/es would stop the bad guy team from stealing an artifact and/or messing with history, using their gadgets or more often their mecha. The formulaic nature of the series was even parodied in the designs of the evil villains: a trio consisting of a hot woman (the leader), a skinny guy with a big nose (the smart one), and a squat guy with ape like proportions (the muscle) who had near identical designs across the multiple shows and always the same voice actors.

The series was incredibly meta-referential, and made fun of itself as much as anything else. However, other than a poorly dubbed and even worse edited VHS release of a few episodes of Time Bokan in the mid 80s (called "Time Fighters"), no series of the franchise saw US release. However, Yatterman and some of the later series DID see release in Europe, even getting quite popular in Italy.

In 2005, riding on the surge of popularity thanks to the anime boom, the Time Bokan OVA was released in US soil. However, it had all the problems of a cheap anime cashgrab release: The script was as direct as possible, with no attempt to localize, and the dubbing was terrible. Since the show was very Japanese to begin with, this naturally leads to quite a few problems.

But on top of that, the worst aspect that stands out is the fact that the Time Bokan OVA was both a TRIBUTE to the franchise on a whole, as well as an attempt to gain public interest in the franchise once again (thus the "Revival" part of the title). Since no Time Bokan show was really released in the USA, all of the references and in-jokes were lost, but the audience is expected to treat them as if they understand.

Saddled with a questionable translation, a poor dub job, and a joke everyone quite -literally- walked in late on, the Time Bokan dubbed OVA stands as a great example of the poor quality anime releases that ultimately helped to "pop" the bubble the market had.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• time
• bokan
• tatsunoko
• episode
• ova
• yatterman
• zenderman
• rescueman
• ippatsuman
• itadakiman
• bad
• dubbing

[2FunnyVersionIV]

Is it just me, or are the Time Bokan villains all inbred?

[matthibner]

This was awesome. Seeing all the villains go at it Wacky Races style was very cool. Tatsunoko rules!