うる星やつら episode 123 (TV anime)
Urusei Yatsura ep. 123 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

 Cherry has been hired by a group of merchants at a beach to find a food stealing youkai, so Cherry attempts to focus in on the youkai‘s youki. Ataru, Lum, Shuutaro, and Shinobu are at this beach to spend the day having fun when they attempt to get some lunch, only to find Ryuunosuke’s father selling food to pay for repairs to his precious (and destroyed) Hamaja-ya. Ryuunosuke sells ice cream and sees so many mothers with children which causes her to pause. Meanwhile, Ataru and Shuutaro are scouting the pretty girls from under the water when Shuutaro sees a woman in a kimono walking on the bottom of the ocean. He points this out to Ataru, who finds himself yanked from the water by Lum for peeping at girls.

Shuutaro gets the woman to shore, so Ataru knocks him out of the way and hits on her in his own way as the woman claims to be looking for her child. Shuutaro returns to knock Ataru out of the way, but it takes Lum and Shinobu to get them focused on finding the woman’s child. Upon seeing Ryuunosuke, the woman reacts as if Ryuunosuke is her child, leading Ryuunosuke’s father to come rushing in and address the woman as “Masako.” Ryuunosuke refuses to believe that someone so beautiful would marry her father.

The group as well as Cherry take Masako in and she eats an incredible amount of food, including taking Ryuunosuke’s father’s food. Ryuunosuke observes this and comes to believe that the woman is indeed her mother. Meanwhile, the shop owners are not happy that Cherry isn’t out looking for the food-stealing youkai and drag him back to work.

That evening, Masako cries on the beach and as Lum comforts her, she notices that Masako has a tail. Ataru confirms this and Masako turns into her youkai form. So the two set out to find Ryuunosuke, who’s been looking for Masako. Ataru takes the time to check Ryuunosuke for a tail leading to some punishment. He convinces Lum to allow Ryuunosuke to continue to believe the lie. However, the shop owners arrive chasing a small youkai who has a lot of food. This is Masako’s child and now that they are reunited, Masako thanks everyone by giving them warm feelings about mothers before the two youkai enter the ocean and swim away.

Thoughts/Review:

This ended up being a strange but rather humorous episode. While I had no hopes that this episode would actually feature Ryuunosuke’s mother, I couldn’t help but think that exploring this aspect of Ryuunosuke’s family would be rather interesting and could be funny. Certainly, the writers seemed to consider this as they had the youkai “Masako” act in a way that would make her seem to be a woman who’d marry Ryuunosuke’s annoying father.

Speaking of youkai, I am amused that this is the second episode in a row in which youkai are a factor in the story. My amusement stems from the fact that youkai are a central part of Inuyasha, which would come out years later. So if this is also a Takahashi-sensei story, then her love of youkai lore has long been there (and indeed, we’ve seen youkai in other episodes of Urusei Yatsura).

As I said, I found this episode to be rather amusing. The aspects of Ryuunosuke trying to decide if Masako is really her mother were fine, but the stuff that had me really laughing was Ataru and Shuutaro going back and forth trying to hit on Masako after she was rescued. It was the way that they did it with the imaginary settings before knocking the other out of the way.

The other funny bit was Ataru’s lechery, or rather the consequences of his copping a feel of Ryuunosuke’s butt. Lum didn’t follow her traditional jealousy outburst complete with electricity but rather gives Ataru a jolt as part of a double team with Ryuunosuke punching Ataru. Ataru returning for more punishment just made me laugh despite it being so predictable. However, the timing of things worked well to me, thus the humor aspects.

The ultra wrong moment was Ryuunosuke’s father cloned to be an entire female synchronized swimming team. ^_^;;;

So a pretty fun and humorous episode to be had here. These are the kind of episodes that tell me why this series is so revered in Japan.