And now, the beach episode! Or “a beach episode”, as the show’s long running enough to do multiple summer holiday episodes.
The gang are on holiday in Hawaii, and in the first story they are surprised to run into Sakura and Cherry also holidaying at the same resort. When the girls swimsuits start to disappear from their hotel rooms, suspicions fall on Ataru. Particularly because he and the Stormtroopers were planning on doing exactly that (along with Cherry, who they had promised Lum’s bikini to).
Then suspicion falls on Megane, who in turn fingers the rest of the Stormtroopers as potential cohorts in their original plan. However when Lum sees a bald head swimming away and dropping a bikini, Cherry becomes the chief suspect. When the thief steals Sakura’s swimsuit while she’s still wearing it, they form a posse to hunt Cherry down and beat him up.
They find the thief in a cove and beat him up, seemingly oblivious that the thief is actually an octopus who simply resembles Cherry. Remember, everyone in UY is an idiot who runs solely on emotion not thought.
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In the second story the girls are admiring Sakura’s figure and ask her how she does it. She tells them she uses “Beauty Food” – an appetite suppressant pill.
The gang are then invited to an all you can eat restaurant, who offer a “Full Course Meal From Hell”. It’s free if you can eat everything on the menu, but if you fail you have to pay. No one has ever managed it, a challenge that Ataru takes up. As does Cherry. And to everyone’s surprise, Sakura.
Ataru is the first to crash out, suffering strange hallucinations. By then Cherry is looking bloated, but Sakura is still as slim as ever. By the time Cherry keels over the restaurant manager is told that if they serve another course they’ll be bankrupt. In an last gasp attempt the spike the course with the very Beauty Food that Sakura had taken earlier, but it is to no avail, her appetite is bottomless. In the end she bankrupts them, and then asks for dessert!
This is the first episode where animation looks a little rough and rushed in places. The first story in particular is all over the place early on, though it has a few nice sequences – Cherry surfing springs to mind.
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Hiroyuki Hoshiyama wrote this episode, the first story had storyboard & direction by Masuji Harada and animation direction from Yuji Yatabe.
The second is Kozima Tamiko on storyboard and direction, with Hayao Nobe as animation director again.