Maybe if you watch it it won't be as good as your unrealistic hopes have blown it up to be, and then you can move on with your life?
Oh, that was never a concern. Urusei Yatsura, for me, is on an ethereal plane beyond all notions of good and bad. I could watch 6 straight hours of Ataru eating gyuudon and I'd be perfecly content and entertained. It's become kind of like breathing for me. The bottom line is that
I HAVE WATCHED IT.
AND IT WAS AWESOME.
I didn't catch all of the dialogue, but it's mainly action anyway (Oshii was definitely nowhere around). The short of it is that it's swim meet day at Tomobiki high school, but everyone is baffled when the competitions begin in the gym rather than the swimming pool. They have to run an obstacle course around the school to get to the pool, and the whole place has been laced with booby traps, such as a giant, labyrinthine water slide maze with only one route that leads to the pool - the others lead to far less pleasant scenarios.
When the survivors make it to the pool (Ataru cheats), they find they have to play a rather anticlimactic game of pool basketball - except that the ball is a bomb. More madness follows, there's giant snakes and aliens and strange creatures and Sakura's fishing injured students out of the pool with a rod & reel and Ryuunosuke's running from her maniacal father whose trying to get her to wear men's swim trunks and Cherry falls into the pool and gets mistaken for an octopus and Kotatsu Neko farts alot and then eventually Lum fries Ataru and inadvertently everyone else in the pool. The prize is a Dappya statue and a kiss from the principal (which nobody wants), so everyone makes a deliberate effort to lose. Of course it ends with a tank battle and the whole school gets encased in ice. Every base has been covered!
Almost everyone in the recurring cast gets a speaking role - even Ataru's parents and Sugar, Ginger, and Pepper. They even found a part for Ryoko Mendou! Sadly, Megane and Lum's stormtroopers don't have speaking roles, but they do each have background cameos. Kousuke, Ataru's friend from the comic who is usually represented by Perm in the old anime, has a speaking role - the first time he's ever been animated. The only voice that was definitely different was Ryuunosuke's father.
So yeah, my life once again has absolutely (
absolutely) no purpose or meaning and as I stare into the vast existential nothingness before me I can feel my life energy slipping away. With luck, I'll be dead before dawn. Give all my games to charity. Tell Mom I love her.
