A Space Pirate Scorned: Notes

Video: Tenchi Muyo! OAV/TV/Movies
Audio: ABCDEFU (Ali Spagnola)
(cover of the original by Gayle)
Download page - Vimeo page

Hey best pal-y! I'm doki!

This video premiered in 2022 and it was my first new release since iDespair in 2009. There was something about 2022 that made it so several editors released their first video in anywhere between 7 and 13 years. Off the top of my head...

VegettoEX - Flashback
MeriToT (MeriC) - Float Away
Fall_Child42 - Truly Truly Truly Cretaceous
AndreKrat (Kristyrat) - Found & Lost
Haunter103 - Thoroughly pucked
Kitsuner - Make Step Up Yours
me - this video

I can't speak for the others, but since falling out of the hobby, I haven't watched much anime. I also don't listen to a lot of music with lyrics (I listen to instrumental music while working), so I've often had difficulty coming up with songs to use.

I happened to see the video for this song on Twitter, and enjoyed the Avenue Q-ish juxtaposition of a crude song being sung cheerily by a puppet. The censored lyrics also happened to make it okay for conventions to show.

When thinking about breakups, I thought about harem anime. I looked up a list, but wasn't familiar with several of them and figured that Tenchi Muyo!, one of the OG harem anime, would have a lot of options for characters to use for all the people mentioned in the song. Then while looking for footage, I realized/remembered that Tenchi has two different mothers depending on if you're talking about the OAVs or the movies, and that his mother appears young in most of the first movie due to time travel, and his sister appears old in the OVAs when we meet her since she's dressing up as her mother... Ugh, whatever. There wasn't great footage of a dog to use, but I thought that using Ryo-Ohki would be amusing.

At one point when I was scanning through footage while listening to the song, Tenchi's dad happened to fall down the stairs when the slide whistle happened. I loved how it looked so I put it in the timeline, but he doesn't appear anywhere else in the video. Falling scenes of Ryoko and Ryo-ohki were used for the two slide whistle sections instead.

For those that don't recognize the "stuff you call art", the painting is Elías García Martínez's "Ecce Homo" which was famously ruined by an amateur art restorer. The film is Tommy Wiseau's "The Room", which currently has a 3.6/10 score on IMDB.

Note: If you saw this video at a convention in 2022, this version has improved lipsync and a changed scene. When I first heard the lyric "dated a girl that I hate for the attention", I first thought of the scene of Ryoko kissing Aeka, since the subject is omitted from the sentence, and because the scene is funny, because the two are usually at each other's throats. (the scene transitions away too quickly so I used a hugging scene instead) After realizing that in context, the boyfriend is the subject of the sentence (oops), I changed the scene.