Episode Seven: The Pioneer Tenchi Muyo Night Before the Carnival Tape

A VHS tape of a thirty-year-old comedy episode about a boy and five alien women arguing in a house. Pioneer, English dub, catalog PIVS-1256D, $20. First tape this series has done, and the point of it is less the episode than the label on the spine. Learn to read a Pioneer tape and you can read the whole first decade of anime on American shelves.

The episode

Tenchi Muyo Ryo-Ohki is a six-episode OVA from 1992 and 1993, made by AIC from a story concept by Masaki Kajishima and produced by Pioneer LDC in Japan. Country kid, a sealed shrine, a demon who turns out to be a space pirate named Ryoko, then a princess, her little sister, a cop, and a scientist, all moving into his house. If that sounds like the template for every harem comedy made since, that is because it is. The six episodes end with the villain Kagato destroyed and the house full.

Then, on September 25, 1993, a seventh. The Night Before the Carnival, Japanese title O-Matsuri Zenjitsu no Yoru, is a side story with no villain and no space battle. Tenchi gives Ayeka a seed, Ryoko and Ayeka copy tactics out of romance manga, Mihoshi crashes into the house, the seed sprouts. That is the plot. Fans file it as episode seven because it sits between the first series and the second one that started in September 1994, and because it is the episode where the show figured out it was funnier at home than in orbit. (The Mihoshi Special came out six months later. That one is a different kind of side story and this post is not about it.)

What Pioneer was

Here is the part worth learning. In 1993 the anime on an American video store shelf came from American companies licensing Japanese shows: Streamline, AnimEigo, U.S. Manga Corps, a young ADV. Pioneer was different. Pioneer LDC was the Japanese company that produced Tenchi in the first place, and its American arm, Pioneer LDCA, started a label called Pioneer Animation in 1993 to sell its own shows here itself. Tenchi Muyo was among the first titles on that label. The producer was the distributor. Nobody between them.

Pioneer's history is a laserdisc history, which is why the label looks the way it does. Pioneer Corporation founded LaserDisc Corporation of America in December 1985, renamed it Pioneer LDCA in 1989, and ran it out of Long Beach. The first Tenchi ads in Animerica, January 1994, were laserdisc ads: episode one at $34.95, with the pitch that LD gave you a bilingual stereo soundtrack and jitter-free freeze frames and VHS did not. The episodes came out here December 1993 through June 1994, one per laserdisc and two to a VHS tape at about $29.98, dub and sub sold separately. The Carnival special landed in the US on June 29, 1994 and, being a special, got a tape to itself.

The rest of the timeline, because it tells you how long these tapes have been orphaned. Pioneer LDCA became Pioneer Entertainment in 1995 to push into VHS and DVD. Dentsu bought the Japanese parent on July 21, 2003 and the US arm became Geneon Entertainment USA. Geneon announced it was closing its distribution operation on September 26, 2007, and the company was dissolved the next day. Funimation picked up the rights to manufacture and sell the back catalog in July 2008. So a tape that says Pioneer on it is from a company that has been renamed twice and dissolved once since it was printed. The tape does not know that.

Reading the tape

The number on the spine is the thing. PIVS-1256D. Pioneer's catalog numbers ran as a four-letter prefix and a four-digit number, and this one adds a letter. The D at the end reads as dub, which matches the box, and a subtitled tape would presumably carry another letter. I could not find a published key for what PIVS stands for against Pioneer's other prefixes, so that is a read, not a fact. The number is still how you tell a first-run Pioneer tape from the later Pioneer and Geneon reissues that put several episodes on one tape with new box art.

The dub is the Pioneer dub: Matt K. Miller as Tenchi, Petrea Burchard as Ryoko, Jennifer Darling as Ayeka, Sherry Lynn as Sasami, Ellen Gerstell as Mihoshi, K.T. Vogt as Washu, Debi Derryberry as Ryo-Ohki. If you met Tenchi on Toonami in the summer of 2000, this is the cast you heard, but not the cut. Cartoon Network aired an edited version and paired this special with another episode into an hour block. The tape is the uncut dub as Pioneer sold it in 1994. That is the whole reason to own a tape of something that is on Blu-ray: the version on the tape is the version that existed first, and nobody fixed it later.

This one

Pioneer, English dub, Hi-Fi stereo. Tape and label clean. Box has edge and corner wear and fraying along the top, which is where a tape box always goes first because that is where thumbs go. The listing says the runtime is about 30 minutes; most references put the special closer to 45, so read the box in the photos and trust the box. Six photos. (A clean tape in a worn box is the right way around. The other way around means somebody kept the box and played the tape to death.)

What it goes for

Not much, and the post should say so. Single-episode Pioneer Tenchi tapes sit on eBay at $9 to $22 asked, and the Carnival special itself is up at about $20 from a European seller, condition very good, insert included. I did not find a clean recent sold price for the dub tape specifically. Pioneer's own later reissues and the Geneon and Funimation discs mean the episode was never scarce; the first-run tape with the catalog number on it is the version people collect, and it is a $10 to $25 object right now. So $20 is the market, not a position. You are paying for the spine.

The tape is here. Read the number.