Well, I’m rapidly forming the conclusion that Studio Deen were much bigger perverts than Studio Pierrot ever were. In this episode, not only do we get more nudity, that nudity is achieved when a tentacle tears someone’s clothes off.
The plot, such as it is, involves Mendou being asked by his Grandfather to recover the family treasure. This can be found by seeking out the family Austrapolar Octopus called Matsu-Chiyo, onto whom they had tattooed a treasure map. This octopus has to be kept in polar conditions, so of course, it escapes into the tropical zone of the Mendou estate.
Once there it grows to a giant size and attacks Ataru, Lum, Shinobu, Megane, Chibi, Kakugari and Ten. It’s Shinobu’s turn to be at the brunt of a horny animator’s pen, and so her safari shirt and bra are torn off by Matsu-Chiyo, before Lum electocutes the creature. They discover that the giant excited octopus is now displaying the tattoo of the map to the treasure. So Ten takes a Polaroid, but Ataru steals it and runs off with it and Shinobu. Everyone else follows, except Mendou who ends up getting hugged by the octopus.
They find themselves in an amusement park that Mendou got for his 5th birthday. At which point the episode turns into a series of set piece chases, encompassing runaway carousel horses, a hall of mirrors, a runaway Ferris wheel, an out of control rollercoaster, a Temple of Doom mine cart sequence, robot penguins and finally a maze. This is fine as these are all things cartoons do well.
Meanwhile Mendou has escaped the octopus and met the ticket booth operator who’s been stuck down here for 12 years since the amusement park was shut, before falling down a trap door to parts unknown. Despite being the motivation for everything in the episode, Mendou is probably the weak link in the script, being shunted from pillar to post by the plot.
The others reach the end of the tresure map, and find a statue of an Octopus. When they open it, they find a frightened Mendou inside and a trap door. This trap door takes them back to where they started, in Mendou’s grandfather’s bedroom. Confused, they ask Grandfather Mendou what the treasure looks like. He tells them it’s a mask. Cue stunned silence, as Mendou Sr. has been wearing this mask all along!
Plenty of scenes in this episode that put a lot of modern TV anime to shame in terms of animation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a claim for 1984 being some sort of golden age. It was likely putting most of the things on TV around then to shame too. Particularly once the sort of effort you see here was put into OAVs rather than TV series. But this is really swanky television animation, both in the big set pieces (the Ferris wheel tearing away from its moorings) and the small stuff (the rant Megane goes on about the rich after seeing Mendou’s 5th birthday present).
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Screenplay: Keiko Maruo
Storyboard: Iku Suzuki
Director: Iku Suzuki
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi