This double episode aired during the fortnight gap between Episode 21 & 22 (2nd April 1982).
The first half, Urusei Yatsura All-Star Bash, is a recap episode. ‘Nuff said!
The second, Grade School Excursion! Run For It! though is a brand new story.
Class 2-4 are on a school excursion to some temples, when they run into Kaede, a kunoichi delivering a scroll to her ninja master. However the scroll falls into Ataru’s hands and the first half of the episode involves Kaede’s attempts to retrieve it.
First she tries to ineptly seduce Ataru, and then when Lum interferes, she uses her ultimate ninja technique (summoning a stampede of pigs!) to retrieve it.
When she’s chastised by her master for ruining the scroll with muddy piggy footprints, she runs away from ninja camp. Leading us to the second half of the story…
Which involves a race between her fellow ninjas (Mukade, Kumade and their ninja army of tiny little ninja followers) and Ataru to find Kaede. They both find her early on, but lose her quickly. Then it’s a series of gags as they race from part time job to part time job, only to find she’s just left the role.
It ends with her seemingly lost forever and 2-4 having a class photo in front of a temple, but it turns out that Kaede is the photographer!
Animation is variable, a few nice scenes, but just as many rushed ones. The script however is great. Some nice verbal gags – Ataru thinks the scroll is “tissue paper marked confidential” and some great visual ones – the tiny ninjas’ arms being too small to unsheath their own swords.
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Grade School Excursion! Run For It! is written by Yu Yamamoto (who we’ve seen a lot of so far) and a newcomer to the series – Kazunori Ito. Ito would take over Yamamoto’s role of series composition for Oshii’s run on the series. Not sure on where this hand over takes place – wikipedia also lists Shiyou Hisakazu (sp?) in that role between Yamamoto and Ito, but they only actually wrote 2 episodes. For more on Ito see this entry in the ground work for my still abortive Urusei Yatsura family tree panel. I suspect I’ll get back to it once I’ve done this exercise as I’m essentially doing all the research for it during this.
Keiji Hayakawa directed and storyboarded, Hayao Nobe was the animation director. Which definitely makes me think this was rushed or made from the dregs of their original budget, as both have produced better animation earlier in the episode.