うる星やつら episode 142 (TV anime)
Urusei Yatsura Ep. 142 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

It is a dark, snowy day at school when Shuutaro decides they should go view the flowers. Ataru scoffs at this due to the snow, but Shuutaro says he has a greenhouse. Shinobu thinks of an ordinary greenhouse, causing Shuutaro to remind her and the others that this a Mendou greenhouse and thus not ordinary. Ditching school, the class heads to Shuutaro’s greenhouse domes where Lum provides juice from her planet. Everyone starts showing signs of getting drunk and when Onsen-sensei drops by, everyone is drunk. Lum swears that there’s no alcohol in the juice but reading the label, she sees the juice has a warning against being served to humans as it first makes them drunk and then causes them to act out a play.

With that, the class suddenly go into a samurai period piece starting in a tea house with Ataru now going by the name “Kin-san” (“kin” meaning “gold”). Shuutaro is the assassin in the play addressed as “Obuke-sama” since he is an aristocratic samurai. As the play continues, suddenly, it becomes an American western (thanks to costume changes by the Mendou staff) with everyone speaking English and Ataru becoming “Mr. Gold.” The play switches back to its original samurai nature when Lum eats an onigiri and get drunk from the umeboshi. Ataru escapes the confines of the greenhouse and is followed out so that the play is enacted on the streets of the city. After the effects of the juice wear off, the students are embarrassed but the crowd wants more so the Mendou staff crop dust the area with juice, causing more “fun” to happen.

Thoughts/Review:

Man, just when you think this series can’t get weirder, it does.

The episode was mostly too weird for my tastes to really be funny. That said, there were some humorous moments. The funniest for me was when the play suddenly (and most unexpectedly) shifted to become an American western. All of the seiyuu began speaking English with the occasional Japanese word thrown in. Japanese honorifics were dropped in favor of western ones and thus Ataru goes from being Kin-san to Mr. Gold. *lol* Thus the parody of the American western went over well for me but I couldn’t help but wonder how it went over with Japanese viewers.

Ataru’s constantly showing his tattoos and referring to himself as one who like to play around (even using the English word “playboy” at one point) was amusing to me as well. I believe Ataru was supposed to be like a yakuza with the tattoos, but I’m not sure about that.

The rest of the play aspects had no meaning to me beyond being a parody of samurai shows in Japan. The end of the episode had all sorts of parody tributes from Godzilla to Power Rangers (more specifically, the super sentai groups in general since there’ve been a ton of them) and even the Incredible Hulk and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Because this episode was so strange and whimsical, there’s not much to say so I’ll move along now.