This Time Bokan release includes material designed for an audience already familiar with the TV series of the same name. It’s an atypical sample of the series that is still unreleased in America.

Time Bokan.
OAV series (2 episodes), 1993-1994. Director: Akira Shigino. 60 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $19.98. Distributor: U.S. Manga Corps/Central Park Media.

Warning! This is not really the famous Time Bokan that anime fans have heard of. Don’t be fooled by an imitation, even if it is from the same studio.

Time Bokan was both an individual anime TV series and the first of seven popular series running for eight years. It was a juvenile slapstick comedy modeled upon Hanna-Barbera’s 1968-70 The Wacky Races. The original Time Bokan (1975-76) was followed by Yattaman, Zendaman, Otasukeman, Yattadetoman, Ippatsuman and Itadakeman, for a total of 408 episodes.

The title always included a groaner pun. “BOKAN” is the traditional Japanese comicbook sound effect for an explosion, so Time Bokan can be read as Time Bomb; a bilingual pun suitable for a sci-fi comedy about time travel. Each series featured two boy-and-girl adolescents and a comedy-relief robot assistant (an imitation R2-D2) as a superhero team, with a ridiculous giant-robot vehicle resembling a huge child’s toy. Their opponents were a gang of three bumbling villains; a femme-fatale leader, a lean “brain” who invented weapons that always backfired, and a hulking goon. The setup involved time travel. The villains were constantly going into the past for some nefarious purpose, and the kid heroes had to stop them. Since the kids had to appear heroic, the villains got to act more comically and with funnier dialogue, like a dishonest version of the Three Stooges. They were always the most popular.

The plots never made sense; they were just an excuse for a barrage of jokes. However, one of Time Bokan‘s virtues was that the humor included satire for adults. One situation had the three villains set up a phony moving company to steal the goods of people who hired them. Their moving van was prominently lettered in English: DOROBO MOVERS. “Dorobo” is the Japanese word for “thief.” Their victims were snobs so impressed by a moving company with an English-lettered name that they did not bother to translate “dorobo” back into Japanese to find out what it meant. The satire was aimed at those Japanese who use English words for prestige value in commercial applications such as product names, without bothering to use or spell them correctly. As a result, Time Bokan had many adult viewers as well as a huge juvenile audience.

Time Bokan lasted for eight years, until the formula was milked dry, and then it was retired in 1983. Ten years later, which also corresponded with the 30th anniversary of Tatsunoko Production Co., it was revived for two half-hour direct-to-video episodes, Time Bokan Royal Revival, released on November 26, 1993 and January 1, 1994. It is these two episodes that are now being released together as a one-hour feature.

In the first half-hour, “The Ticky-Ticky Waga-Waga Boko-Boko Machine Crazy Race,” all seven villain gangs from the different series race in their funny giant robots to prove which trio is the greatest (meaning not which is fastest but which can out cheat the others). This is really a blatant Wacky Races copy. In the second, the winners (Doronjo, Boyakey and Donzler, the Dorombo Gang from Yattaman) start their own animation studio, figuring to cash in on anime by making movies so bad the public will pay to get out of the theater. Then they terrorize “the Tatsunoko Kingdom” with a new giant robot, Sailor Mun Mun, a parody of Sailor Moon. They are opposed by all of Tatsunoko’s 1970s dramatic anime superheroes making comically out-of-character guest appearances.

This is a very bad introduction to Time Bokan. The two episodes were designed for an audience already familiar with the TV series. Moreover, they parody Time Bokan rather than presenting two additional episodes. So they are an atypical sample, full of in-group references that, since Time Bokan is still unreleased in America, most viewers will not understand. Unless you are desperate for a Time Bokan sample, you can skip this one.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).