うる星やつら episode 140 (TV anime)
Urusei Yatsura Ep. 140 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Shuutaro makes preparations for a giant New Years celebration to include a cake of room-sized proportions. He tries to keep it secret from Ryoko so that she won’t be there for Ataru to hit on. Naturally, Ryoko learns of it and is offended, thus sends a letter to Tobimaru. Tobimaru takes the letter to be a challenge to him by Shuutaro. Meanwhile, New Year’s arrives and the giant sponge cake serves as the room for Shuutaro’s party for his classmates. Ryoko sends ozouni to the party, which Shuutaro immediately suspects as being poisoned or filled with an explosive. Ataru doesn’t believe it, so Shuutaro decides Ataru should eat it. Opening the pot, they find it empty, save for Cherry with a letter from Ryoko, saying she’ll be marrying Tobimaru.

Shuutaro decides to check and near the candy church, his cameras pick up Ryoko in a wedding dress. Doing further scans, he finds “Ton-chan” eating his way into the cake structure to get at Shuutaro. However, Shuutaro assumes that Tobimaru must have forced Ryoko to marry him and is ticked. He offers a gift to anyone who can stop the marriage but when Cherry produces a second letter from Ryoko mentioning the land mines and they see Tobimaru get hit by one, Shuutaro has no takers (Ataru having been silenced by Lum). As such, Shuutaro raises the ante so that the gift is a 3-karat diamond and when Lum produces a mine detector (displaying that Ryoko has set out tons of mines), the game is afoot.

After everyone but Ataru changes from kimonos to sweat suits, they head down the tunnel in the sponge cake Tobimaru made by eating. Ataru complains about moving in his kimono and when he mentions for the second time that it is so he can marry Ryoko, Lum sends him into a mine. Ataru ends up following Tobimaru’s method of eating a tunnel, which others like Cherry emulate as well. Ataru makes his way to the edge of the cake and breaks through, allowing Shuutaro, Lum, Shinobu, and Ataru to the top of the cake, which uses icing, candy, and more to recreate Hansel and Gretal’s adventure. After a bomb set to look like Hansel and Gretal hits Shuutaro, they find Tobimaru stuffed from having eaten so much.

Tobimaru and Shuutaro are about to square off when Ryoko arrives. The mayhem kicks in when Ataru continually attempts to insert himself into the mix. Ryoko takes a gun and forces Tobimaru to flee with her. When he stops and asks why, she’s offended but it allows Shuutaro and the others to get there. Ryoko opens fire on them, causing mines to explode. Shuutaro agrees to allow Ryoko to marry if he is defeated. Again, Ataru gets in the way of Tobimaru and Shuutaro squaring off, grabbing Ryoko to flee. When she asks why, he says that based on Shuutaro’s conditions, Ryoko would be forced to marry Lum.

Lum puts an end to Ataru’s plan, leading to another square off between Shuutaro and Tobimaru. However, when Tobimaru attempts to flee rather than be with Ryoko, she brings him back with a series of well-tossed grenades. Shuutaro sees the battered Tobimaru return and decides to allow Ryoko to marry him after such a gesture. Tobimaru attempts to protest that he doesn’t want to marry Ryoko as one of her bodyguards comes to take her home. As she leaves, her land mines begin going off, destroying Shuutaro’s candy and cake village. Once returned to her room, she sets off the big bomb, sending her brother and others into the sky.

Thoughts/Review:

This episode is like a lot of Urusei Yatsura episodes of late — starts off one place and ends up in wacky-ville! *lol*

While the whole notion of making a giant room for a party inside of a gargantuan sponge cake is nutty in and of itself, the attempts to leave by eating their way out made me think, “if they have to eat their way out, just how the heck did they get in?” Of course it is best not to ask such questions since the absurdity of having to eat their way out was actually pretty funny to me. Actually, once that started, I thought, “was Dig Dug out as a game yet when this episode was released?” Considering that Dig Dug came out in 1982 in Japan and this episode came out sometime in late ’84 or early ’85, the answer is “yes” and thus I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that there may have been a parody there.

However humorous the eating through sponge cake was, the real humor was Ataru’s ceaseless attempts to get to Ryoko so that he could marry her. I remember when Ataru’s lechery was so annoying when I first watched UY. Now, because of how it is written and animated, combined with the excellent seiyuu work by FURUKAWA Toshio (Ataru’s seiyuu), his “nothing can stop me from getting to the babe” stuff just makes me laugh. Its because you just never know what Ataru is going to show up again (and again) and the unexpected (even though you know Ataru will show back up) is funny.

I do wish that Ryoko would have taken some collateral damage during at least one of Lum’s punishment sessions of Ataru. Sometimes, others get caught up in Lum’s electrocutions and it would rock if Ryoko got smacked by one of these. I have a feeling she never will be though.

So a fun, strange, wacky episode.