Topic: A UY "Homage" in a Current Anime

[Lum-chan]

By Dave Baranyi on Friday, August 6, 1999 - 05:49:
This evening I was watching a recently broadcast episode of the current anime "Gokudou-kun" and I spotted a pretty clear Urusei Yatsura reference in it. For those of you who haven't heard of Gokudou-kun, it is an extremely crazy, complicated and funny adventure/magic show about a rogue call Gokudou and his adventures in a mixed-up ancient Far and Near East. To a good extent Gokudou-kun "feels" like some of the Urusei Yatura episodes when the UY gang was placed in some ancient historical or mythological setting.

Anyway, in this episode, Gokudou and the other main cast members are trying to put on a variety show for a huge army of Chinese Oni ( don't ask - it would take pages for me to fill in how things got to this point ). The Oni look like the mythological Oni ( such as the Oni ghosts in UY Movie 4 ) instead of Lum and her relatives. But, just as the variety show is supposed to start a small figure flies out to strike a gong. The figure is Ten! He has red hair, but his face, horn and little tiger striped diaper are just the same as in all the UY shows.

UY is not forgotten in Japan by any means. The UY episodes from the entire series are being repeated 5 times a week on at least two Japanese TV channels. When I was in Tokyo last month all the big electronics stores that carried laser discs still had the Pony Canyon LDs of the TV series, OAVs and movies. And last year, during the first season of the "Anime Complex" show, they played all the openings and closings from the UY TV series, without the titles.