Urusei Yatsura 84
うる星やつら episode 84 (TV anime)

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Cherry presents an idea of what would happen if Global Cooling took effect. His story has Ataru, Lum, Shinobu and Mendou at Mendou’s mountain home. After Lum pours an entire bottle of Tabasco onto the pot of spaghetti, she’s banned from seasoning anything. Ataru gives her a Tororo potato and tells her to shred it and let Shinobu make the spaghetti instead. Lum looks for a potato shredder and returning to the counter, she finds the potato gone. She wonders if maybe it ran off on its own.

That evening, Lum is cleaning in the kitchen when the water stops. Upstairs, Mendou is about to take a shower, only to have the water cut off and a thick substance starts coming out. He screams which brings the others running. However, they find nothing wrong and no substance. Indeed, the water flow returns. Later, when Ataru is preparing to cut open a watermelon for them to eat, inside is a mass which attacks Ataru in the face, appearing to be trying to smother him. In response, Ataru sucks up the substance and identifies it as Tororo potatoes (apparently mashed).

The group finds itself under attack from swarms of Tororo potatoes. Mendou uses his sword to slice them up, but that only makes things worse since the mashed potato substance then attacks them. The group counters for a while by slurping up potatoes but there are too many. The retreat upstairs and find that potatoes are everywhere. Lum blasts a whole in the wall and the group escapes out but giant potatoes are growing everywhere. When the sun comes up, the growth stops. Ataru suggests that they head into the town at the foot of the mountain but that means going through a field of these potatoes. Mendou finds that too dangerous so they go the long way.

Mendou leads them through the mountains but soon they run into a dead end. Mendou says they simply need to follow the river below, so after Lum flies them all down, they get on a raft and start floating downstream. Unfortunately, potatoes start popping up in the river which freaks Mendou. The river then goes into a rapids complete with a waterfall, which destroys the raft. The group makes it to shore and that evening, they finally make it out to where the town is supposed to be, only to find it overrun with potatoes.

Thoughts/Review:

I’ve never seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this episode is a parody of that movie (itself, a parody of B-movies), only replacing tomatoes with potatoes.

Regardless, I found this episode to be pretty funny. I’d forgotten about Lum’s love of spicy hot food, so Shinobu’s telling Mendou and Ataru that Lum had poured an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce the spaghetti and their reaction was funny to me. I wonder if that joke will get old.

What is funnier are the Tororo potatoes. I laughed at the brief solution to the problem — eat the potatoes (which I guess are mashed based on how things looked). The trip down the river was predictable, but amusing in that by this time, I was simply enjoying the ride. Shinobu remarked on expecting things to go as they did and that’s true but as I said, it didn’t matter.

I think the thing that was the most interesting aspect was that this episode was based on Cherry’s remarks of what would happen if Global Cooling happened and only a couple of degrees (centigrade?) were lost. Now remember, this is from the first half of the 80’s before this Global Warming frenzy, which has now “cooled” (no pun intended) as now there are predictions of Global Cooling being in our near future and indeed some evidence of this happening. It just goes to show how quickly things are forgotten about environmental concerns in favor of the next crisis. ^_^;;; That’s why I can’t get worked up when someone spouts off that were going to burn up in a ball of fire because the climate is always changing and what the Chicken Little types screech about changes from decade to decade.

So a weird episode, but fun nevertheless.