うる星やつら episode 121 (TV anime)
Urusei Yatsura ep. 121 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Kurama goes through her daily routine but gets frustrated that she still doesn’t have a man. Her Karasutengu claim they’ve been using computers to find her the perfect man and that’s why it has taken so long. She’s mollified for a time as they desperately look for another man. To their extreme relief, they find such a man.

Meanwhile, Ran is with Rei on some distant planet feeding him taiyaki and takoyaki when they are taken by the Karasutengu and brought to Kurama’s ship. Kurama sees Rei and is immediately smitten. Ran isn’t going to take this lying down, so Kurama literally send her flying where she crashes into Lum. Ran is desperate and Lum agrees to help, but hearing the Kurama is involved, Lum wants out but Ran won’t let her.

Back at Kurama’s ship, Rei is feasting on tons of rice, forcing the Karasutengu to have to go out and purchase a few hundred pounds of rice. Ataru sees this and decides to tag along while at the same time, Ran drags Lum to Kurama’s ship. Kurama is not happy to see Ran again nor Lum and Rei is excited to see Lum and turns into his tiger-cow form briefly. Ataru arrives and the fun is on with Ataru hitting on Ran and Kurama and being punished by all three girls. This continues to Kurama’s bedroom. Lum sees that Kurama doesn’t know Rei’s true form but she can’t get Kurama to see it as Rei changes back so quickly. However, when Ran falls down to Kurama’s bedroom with a large cloth of onigiri, Rei rescues her but seeing the onigiri causes him to turn into tiger-cow form in front of Kurama, to her dismay.

Thoughts/Review:

While this episode did start off kind of slow, I have to say that the second half of the episode had me laughing quite a bit. For starters, I did enjoy the slapstick humor. The traditional Lum electrocutions were there, but when the classic large wooden mallet came out, it became funny, especially when Lum switched to using it herself rather than her electric attack. Ataru’s constant hitting on both Ran and Kurama came off as funny too, which is a good thing since his lechery is often not funny.

That said, the biggest laughs for me came from the idiot Rei and his constant transformations to tiger-cow form whenever Kurama was not looking. Of course Kurama’s crow servants had to cover this which lead Rei to just escalate his antics by turning tiger-cow and then making a lot of noise. One of the Karasutengu remarked that Rei had to be doing this on purpose, which seems likely but who cares? The whole chaotic elements of the 2nd-half of the episode were quite funny, enough so that I’m still chuckling.

One little side-note on AnimEigo’s translations. I know these are old but I question why they didn’t have Ran refer to herself in the third person since that’s what she does to indicate childlike behavior. Oh well.

So, a good episode that starts slow but ends well. ^_^