During a lightning storm, mail arrives in the form of a peach (a reference to Momotaro). Inside the peach is the next main cast member – Ten.
Ten is Lum’s “cute” baby cousin. However appearances are deceptive and it’s soon clear that he is a manipulative brat, just as dysfunctional as any other cast member. He spends the episode buttering up Lum, Ataru’s mother and Shinobu, while bad mouthing Ataru and setting him on fire with his flame breath. Ataru’s Dad in the meantime just tries to ignore yet another houseguest and read his paper.
As will become a common occurance, the first story in this episode ends with the Moroboshi’s home being blown to kingdom come…
A fairly typical example of how these early two story episodes work – the first story acts as an introduction to a new character, giving you who they are and the basics of their personalities. Then the second episode is more of a straight story with them in it.
Ten is voiced by Kazuko Sugiyama. Her other famous roles include “Jun the Swan” in Gatchaman, “Heidi” in Heidi, and “Akane” in Dr. Slump. More recently she’s been “Dante” in Fullmetal Alchemist.
—
The second story is what got me hooked on the series. It’s an exercise in comedic escalation that takes full advantage of a cartoon’s ability to hit the reset button for the next episode. It also establishes class 2-4’s classroom as one of the frequent sets of the show.
Ten feeds a swallow some extra-dimensional candy, causing it to grow. Shortly a “penguin” shows up in Ataru’s classroom (there’s generic teacher at present, we’ll get named recurring teachers later in the series). The attempts to catch the penguin cause chaos throughout Tomobiki High School. Ten shows up and the secret of the penguin is revealed – it’s the swallow, enlarged by the space candy.
Then a truck full of real penguins crashes…
Sadly the swallow is now too large to feed her babies so Ten hatches a plan…
Things then escalate, until…
Nothing is resolved or fixed, because to do so wouldn’t be funny. It’s great.
As a firm believer that great cartoons come from taking a single idea, then escalating it to its logical extreme, I think this works wonderfully. The story only has one idea – “alien candy makes Earth creatures bigger” – but it takes that and runs with it. Without this one story I don’t think anime would have got its hooks into me the way it did.
—
Both stories were written by Shusuke Kaneko, a man with a ridiculously interesting c.v., porn, anime, Godzilla, the Death Note movies, he’s done it all.
Mail From Space was storyboarded by Yuzo Aoki (Lupin III Part III), directed by Masuji Harada (Obake no Q-Taro 1985) with animation direction from Yuji Yatabe (Thundercats).
Mrs Swallow was storyboarded & directed by Kozima Tamiko with animation direction from Asami Endo.