We’re still in the summer of 1982, as the gang head to the beach.
And if anime has taught us anything about Japanese culture this means watermelons must be smashed by people in blindfolds.
When a watermelon salesman mysteriously refuses to sell them a single watermelon the gang ponder what it means.
Cut to Cherry and Sakura being asked to calm the spirit of a watermelon that has been haunting a village. That’s right, a watermelon. Which they worship as a god. You see one day a year they forgo eating watermelon to calm the spirit and today is that day, hence the reluctance to sell the gang a watermelon.
Now this bizarre fact has been established, cue the gang finding said haunted watermelon. They inadvertently hurt it’s feelings, which causes it to roll after them. Then the village mistakes this for them stealing their god, and they start a lynch mob.
When it squashes Ataru, Lum gets angry and cracks the Watermelon, giving it a face (and bizarrely arms and legs). It starts vengefully “haunting” the village then. However its haunting is just spitting watermelon seeds, so the villagers spit them back in return.
The end! But we’re only half way through the episode…
Yes, this is like an old school episode, it’s essentially two stories in the same setting.
The second involves another goblin. Oddly, not the one we met in Mendou’s swimming pool, but it is just as pitiful and sorry for itself. He’s sad that the gang are leaving, even though they’ve never met him before. He’d seen them getting sentimental over the end of summer and he wanted to get sentimental too.
It actually turns out that he has some kind of perverse empathy, which he uses to make people feel worse. So when Mendou fails to hit on Sakura, he sympathises, making him feel even worse. Likewise when Shinobu thinks about how she didn’t make a move on Mendou herself during the holidays, he tells her he knows how she’s feeling.
Unfortunately, this second story just fizzles out, feeling like a half formed idea that’s used for some sketchy character and mood beats. I know it’s going for a parody of the over sentimentalisation of the end of summer that appears in a lot of manga and anime, but it falls too close to just being more of that, rather than mocking it.
The watermelon story was a lot of fun though, almost the entirety of it is a chase, which UY always does fine with.
—
Screenplay: Yukiyoshi Ohashi
Storyboard: Kanzaki Mitsugi
Director: Keiji Hayakawa
Animation Director: Hayao Nobe