When Lum plucks Ataru’s diary from the future, she tries to use it to make his day go better. However when Ataru gets hold of it he then uses it to live out the day as he will write it instead of trying to avoid the perils that will befall him. This is due to the cryptic way in which he writes his diary entries which can usually be read in more than one way. During all this, Mendou finds the very idea that Ataru is writing a diary hilarious.
We also get to meet the female equivalent of Lum’s Stormtroopers, the Shutaro Mendou Secret Fan Club, a gang of schoolgirl delinquents who beat Ataru up. Eventually Lum tries to get back the diary, leading to Ataru treading on the time machine and falling into the gap between today and tomorrow…
A nice simple gag episode, that hinges on Ataru misreading his own future diary. The animation is terrible early on, but the sequence where he falls between the days is well executed.
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And now another good example of what Mendou brings to the show, he can occasionally take the role of the tormented character instead of Ataru.
In this story, Mendou finds an alien baby in his locker. He first tries to hide it in Ataru’s locker, but it follows him to his chemistry class. He shoves it up his lab coat and pretends to be ill to sneak out the class. Lum and Ten find him and begin to tease him, such as suggesting Cherry is the mother!
He calls his company to deliver milk and nappies, but they do it as an airdrop, alerting the whole class to his situation. This causes all the girls to faint as they imagine Mendou’s secret alien wife.
Meanwhile Ataru finds a strange vending machine that deposits a dummy when he places a 100Yen coin in it. This turns out to be the “baby”‘s translator. The baby is actually an adult, the vending machine his spaceship and he needs 100Yen coins to power it! Mendou is more than happy to pay up to get rid of “his” baby.
The final payoff is that almost immediately more vending machines start falling from the sky as more of the “babies” arrive to refuel!
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Both stories were written by Akira Nakahara. The first was Kozima Tamiko on storyboard and directing duties, with Hayao Nobe on animation direction.
Keiji Hayakawa was on the second story, with Asami Endo again as the animation director.