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Urusei Yatsura (うる星やつら) is a well-known 1970s and 1980s manga and
anime series. The title is a complicated Japanese pun which roughly translates as "those obnoxious aliens". The animated verion spanned
six films, 218 TV episodes, and ten OVAs.
Warning: Plot details
follow.
The Story
The series is very light-hearted in nature and often quite bizarre. It concerns the adventures of a group of teenagers on a
slightly fantastical and often ridiculously surreal version of Earth. The story centers around an extremely lecherous and very
unlucky high-school boy, Ataru Moroboshi, and bikini clad alien princess Lum. Lum is in love with Ataru because he accidental
proposed to her, even though he chases after every humanoid female other than Lum. (It's not that she's ugly, it's just
that he lost interest in her as soon as she started chasing him) The series is mainly episodic,
with only occasional plots spanning more than one chapter/episode. Each chapter/episode usually concerns Ataru's ill-luck, his
lechery (and Lum's jealousy thereof), or the wide variety of weird humans and aliens who love, hate, or simply meddle with Lum
and Ataru.
Only You
The first movie was entitled Only You. The main characters are:
- Lum, an alien princess who can fire out bolts of lightning
- Ataru Moroboshi, a lecherous human, with whom Lum is in love
- Elle, another alien princess, who is in charge of Planet Elle
- Benten, Lum's friend
The basic plot of the first film is that the five-year-old Ataru steps on Elle's shadow during an impromptu game of
shadow-tag; in Elle's culture, this is viewed as a marriage proposal. Twelve years later, Elle returns to Earth in order to marry
Ataru - by which time not only had he forgotten the events of his childhood, but he was also going out with Lum. The rest of the
plot focuses on Lum's attempts to prevent the marriage.
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