FLOAT 100 · Art · No. 93
Time Bokan (Red)
A grinning skull rises as a mushroom cloud, its eyes full of smiling flowers: Takashi Murakami borrowed the gag that ended every episode of a 1970s Saturday cartoon and turned it into one of his darkest and most reproduced images.
- Year
- 2001
- Maker
- Takashi Murakami
- By price in art
- 96 of 100
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Create a free account- Artist
- Takashi Murakami (born 1962, Tokyo)
- Image
- A skull-shaped mushroom cloud with flower-filled eyes, on a red ground
- Medium
- Offset lithograph in colors with silver, on smooth glossy wove paper
- Size
- 50 x 50 cm (about 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in)
- Edition
- 300, signed and numbered in ink at lower right
- Publisher
- Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., Tokyo
- Date
- Disputed: listings give 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2011; the artist's gallery sells it as 'Introduced in 2001'
- Source of the image
- Time Bokan, an anime series that aired on Fuji TV from 1975 to 1976
- Series
- Murakami's Time Bokan paintings, begun in 1993
The explosion at the end of every episode
Time Bokan was a Japanese anime series produced by Tatsunoko Production. It ran on Fuji TV every Saturday at 6:30 pm from October 4, 1975, to December 25, 1976: 61 half-hour episodes about a team of children traveling through time to find a missing scientist, chased by a trio of villains in absurd machines. Bokan is an onomatopoeic word for the sound of an explosion.
The show ran on a fixed formula. The villains always lost, usually when their own doomsday device backfired, and each episode ended with their machine blowing up. A critic writing in Murakami's own 2005 exhibition catalog described that recurring blast as a mushroom cloud reminiscent of the atomic bomb. The villains always returned the next week.
Murakami grew up a fan of anime and manga and once hoped to work as an animator. He took the skull-shaped cloud from the show and made it his own, replacing the empty eye sockets with garlands of his smiling flowers. A 2009 exhibition text says he began the Time Bokan series of paintings in 1993.
Takashi Murakami and Kaikai Kiki
Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo on February 1, 1962. He went to Tokyo University of the Arts intending to learn the drafting skills of an animator, but majored in Nihonga, the traditional style of Japanese painting, and went on to earn a doctorate there. In 1994 a fellowship took him to New York for a year, where he was drawn to the work of Jeff Koons and Anselm Kiefer.
In 1996 he opened the Hiropon Factory, a production workshop modeled on the studio systems of traditional Japanese painting and of anime companies. In 2001 it was incorporated as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., the company that published this print. The name, meaning 'brave, strong and sensitive,' comes from a 17th-century critic's description of the painter Kano Eitoku.
In 2000 Murakami published his Superflat theory, arguing that the flat imagery of anime and manga descends from older Japanese art, and that postwar Japanese society had itself been flattened. He repackages his paintings as prints, plush toys and T-shirts at lower prices, deliberately blurring the line between high art and merchandise. Prints like this one are part of that strategy.
Little Boy: the bomb behind the cute
The Time Bokan skull is one of Murakami's most direct references to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In April 2005 he curated 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' at the Japan Society in New York, the final installment of his Superflat trilogy. Little Boy was the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
In the exhibition catalog the critic Noi Sawaragi wrote that, while some argue Murakami never refers to the war directly, Time Bokan does: it depicts a skull-shaped mushroom cloud. The catalog reproduced a painted Time Bokan - Blue from 2001, acrylic on canvas mounted on wood.
A 2009 exhibition text explained the appeal: the cloud marked the villains' defeat, yet they came back unfailingly the next week, and children loved them for it. Read that way, the image is both a memorial to catastrophe and a joke about surviving it.
The print, and a tangle of dates
Time Bokan - Red is an offset lithograph, 50 x 50 cm, in an edition of 300, signed and numbered in ink at lower right and published by Kaikai Kiki in Tokyo. Catalogers describe it as printed in colors with silver ink on smooth or glossy wove paper; one dealer listing adds cold stamping and a high-gloss varnish. The same image was issued in other colorways, including black, blue, green and pink.
The date is a muddle. The artist's gallery in Paris sells it as 'Introduced in 2001,' and several auction catalogs date it 2001. A print-market site dates it 2006, the FLOAT record gives 2010, and other auction and gallery listings say 2011. The most likely explanation is that the image dates from 2001 and the edition was printed later, but no source we found states the printing date outright.
Collectors should also not confuse it with RED-TIME, a separate Time Bokan print usually dated 2008. Auction houses sometimes sell RED-TIME and the colored Time Bokan sheets together as multi-print lots, which makes price records easy to misread.
On the market
With 300 impressions, Time Bokan - Red appears at auction a few times a year across the U.S. and Britain. In March 2016 a copy offered at auction in Costa Mesa, California, with a $2,100 to $2,400 estimate went unsold. In July 2023 a copy sold online in Britain for £875 including premium, against an estimate of £400 to £600; the result was published only in pounds. A print-market tracker records a March 2022 sale in London, also in pounds.
Dealers continue to offer it. In October 2026 the artist's Paris gallery shop listed an impression at €1,800 including tax. No single-copy sale we could verify was published in U.S. dollars, so this page lists no dollar price.
The numbers
- Medium
- Offset lithograph in colors with silver ink
- Dimensions
- Sheet 50 x 50 cm (19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in)
- Edition size
- 300, signed and numbered in ink
- Publisher
- Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., Tokyo
- Date
- Image introduced 2001; edition variously dated 2001, 2006, 2010 or 2011
- Related colorways
- Black, blue, green and pink sheets of the same image; RED-TIME is a separate print
Timeline
The atomic bomb known as Little Boy is dropped on Hiroshima.
Takashi Murakami is born in Tokyo.
Time Bokan premieres on Fuji TV.
The 61st and final episode of Time Bokan airs.
Murakami begins his Time Bokan series of paintings, according to a 2009 exhibition text.
Murakami opens the Hiropon Factory in Tokyo.
Murakami publishes his Superflat theory in a catalog for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The Hiropon Factory is incorporated as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. Murakami paints Time Bokan - Blue, and the artist's gallery dates the Time Bokan - Red image to this year.
'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture,' curated by Murakami, opens at the Japan Society in New York.
An exhibition of new Time Bokan paintings opens, presented as a vanitas and a form of self-portraiture.
A copy offered at auction in Costa Mesa, California, goes unsold.
A remake of the anime, Time Bokan 24, begins airing.
A copy sells online in Britain for £875.
The artist's Paris gallery shop offers an impression at €1,800.
The world in 2001
Greece becomes the 12th country to join the eurozone.
The Taliban begin destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
The September 11 attacks kill nearly 3,000 people in the United States.
A U.S.-led coalition invades Afghanistan.
Wikipedia launches.
Nintendo releases the GameCube and Game Boy Advance, Microsoft the Xbox and Apple the iPod. Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away is the year's top-grossing non-English-language film.
Price record
| Date | Price | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 4, 2026 | $2,052 | Asking price, not a saleA Paris gallery shop: EUR 1,800 (asking price), shown in USD at the Federal Reserve rate on the sale date (1 EUR = 1.1400 USD). |
A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.
By reference price, Time Bokan (Red) is number 96 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (93 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.
Did you know
- The villains in the original Time Bokan blew themselves up so reliably that the show's director reused the same drawings of leftover debris across the early episodes.
- Bokan is Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of an explosion, roughly 'kaboom.'
- Murakami titled his 2005 New York exhibition Little Boy, the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- Kaikai Kiki, the publisher's name, comes from a 17th-century critic's praise of the painter Kano Eitoku.
- In 2008 Time magazine named Murakami one of its 100 most influential people, the only visual artist on the list.
How this page is made
- The figure
- One reference price, shown with its own kind. FLOAT does not average it with anything or adjust it for time.
- Realized or not
- A realized price is a completed sale. An asking price, an estimate and a price-guide value are not sales, and are labeled as such wherever they appear.
- The story
- Researched from published records and checked fact by fact. Updated Oct 3, 2026.
- Archive
- Oct 5, 2026