A great story, that doesn’t quite get the visual pay off it deserves.
Ran phones Lum threatening to take Ataru from her. So Lum makes Ataru stay inside, much to his annoyance as he’s made a date with Shinobu. When he discovers a love letter from Ran asking him to meet her at the same time as he’s due to meet Shinobu, he declares he needs two bodies. Which gives the idea to Lum of using her copy gun to create a duplicate Ataru to distract Ran, while she keeps the real one tied up at home. However, she doesn’t count on the copy tieing her up and freeing the real one so they can both go on the arranged dates.
Later when Lum catches Ran with Ataru, Ran produces her own copy gun (they made them in Arts and Crafts when they were little kids!) and creates her own duplicate Ataru. This all escalates until we end up with this sort of nonsense:
This is exactly the sort of escalating cartoon plot I like, but the reliance at the end on repeated sequences, takes some of the wind out of it’s sails. If anything, the escalation in the craziness of the story is matched with a increasing conservatism in the animation in the episode.
A couple of really nice touches to the story came from the manga if I remember correctly. Firstly it’s great how the duplicate Ataru’s all think like him, when he first gets duplicated, both the Atarus want to go on both the dates. Secondly, in a clever visual gag, the duplicate Ataru’s have a “dash” over the heads to indicate the duplicated nature.
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Screenplay: Tadashi Fukui
Storyboard: Motosuke Takahashi
Director: Kozima Tamiko
Animation Director: Asami Endo