Mahoutsukai Tai!

Mahoutsukai Tai was released as an OVA in '96 & '97 from Production Reed. The OVA spawned a whole bunch of follow up media including manga and a thirteen episode anime. The good news is that this is the same studio that brought us Nuku Nuku. The bad news is they also brought us Nuku Nuku Dash. So, I have no idea how this one is going to turn out. 

Story:

Our story begins with invaders from space. They declare themselves in charge and defeat the forces sent against them. They proceed to hang around, doing nothing unless provoked and just kind of observing. They even obey traffic ... laws. Well, that's a convenient invading force. They don't care if we keep governing ourselves and going about things as normal. They just want to hang around. Our protagonists are part of a High School magic club and they accidentally draw the aliens' attention when they're going to attack their Bell-like base because their leader wants to impress the girls in the club. 

I could poke into all the dumb elements of the plot, but the OVA is ostensibly a comedy. So, the dumb stuff is pretty much by design for comedic effect. What I will criticise the OVA for is that the humour is fairly lacklustre. This is one of those comedies where the best it gets is being "kind of funny" with the potential to be funnier if there was a stronger build up. Take, for example, Akane decide to inflate a dude because he's, supposedly, being creepy. That's kind of funny. If they had more set up where we could see what this guy did to deserve being inflated like a balloon, it might have very well been funnier.

And that's when the jokes are at the high level of "kind of funny." A lot of the time, they're just not funny. There are a lot of "jokes" that basically boil down to Takeo acting pervy towards the girls or Ayanojou making unwanted advances towards Takeo. Basically, a lot of shit that's a bit uncomfortable. At least they don't delve into full gay joke territory, though they border on it at times.

Characters:

The characters are pretty one note archetypal. Which would be fine since you don't need incredibly deep or complex characters in a comedy. You just need characters with strong comedic interactions. Which doesn't happen in this series. The dynamics are just generally trite and kind of boring. 

Art:

The artwork is basically passable. It can be overly crass with the fan-service at times and the alien designs are boring. They're just a lot of circles, mechanical tentacles with eyes at the end of them and vaguely humanoid androids. Other than that, it's functional. 

Sound:

They got some really good actors like Koyasu Takehito or Iizuka Mayumi but the performances are pretty mediocre. Probably because this is one of those comedies where they try to compensate for the lack of strong jokes with a lot of exaggeration. Oshima Michiru's music is decent enough. It's a bit more standard than her tracks usually are, but it's better than the soundtrack for Kaze no Tairiku, at least. 

Ho-yay:

There's all the stuff with Ayanojou flirting with Takeo. It's very clear that it's one-sided though. 

Areas of Improvement:

Stop the fan-service with adolescent girls. Somewhere, some dude named Donald who never bathes, is in his forties and on a government watch list is into that. But it's still tawdry. Plus, it does limit your audience when you get really fan-servicey with teenage girls. Teenagers may get excited for it. Donald is into it. For the rest of us, it's just trashy.
Better set ups for the jokes. Having Sae decide she's going to be less clumsy only to immediately fall over isn't all that funny. Having her decide she was going to be less clumsy, last a while and then fall over when she's feeling proud of herself would be funnier. Either way, it's obvious that she's going to fail. The second method just gives some build up to it instead of an immediate pay off because they think the people watching this will forget the set up if the joke stemming from it isn't immediate.
Take more advantage of the magic. For a work with magic as a central element, they don't do much with it in terms of the comedy. About the furthest they go is Takeo accidentally shrinking himself. And even then they barely do anything with him being shrunk. You could do all sorts of crazy comedic stuff with magic as a tool. And I feel that's where this OVA could have shined, if they'd done a better job taking advantage of it.

Final Thoughts:

This is another one I can't really call bad. It has a lot of problems. It's certainly not good. But it does have its kind of funny moments and it is only six episodes long. So, if you like the idea of aliens fighting wizards, you might enjoy it. For myself, it was sub-par. I'm giving it a 4/10.