Class 2-4 show off their special talents in a talent show. Didn’t we do this one already?
Well not quite, but is a little similar. After a slightly surreal dance opening with Lum, we get a lengthy nostalgia insert with the Headmaster contemplating his youth. Specifically his times spent at both the cinema and attending Rakugo performances. This burst of nostalgia leads to the organising of a talent show in Class 2-4 with a friend of Lum’s called Gei Hitosuji acting as judge. He’s little red blob of an alien with a rather harsh line in judgement. All the acts he doesn’t like he makes disappear. It soon becomes clear that he gives the women a free pass, no matter how pathetic their act is, and only makes the men disappear. So one by one, the Stormtroopers, Mendou and Ryuu’s dad are vanished. He’s about to vanish Ryuu, until Ataru pulls open her shirt to reveal that she’s female.
Eventually the missing people return (after some appalling singing from Lum), but refuse to discuss the horrors they saw. However Gei tells them they have to come up with some good acts or he’ll send them back. They don’t, and he does. Meanwhile Ataru has dressed as a schoolgirl to avoid being vanished. But when he tries to do his “act”, Ryuu reveals that he’s a man, by lifting up his skirt. Ataru demands that Gei shows off his talent rather than force everyone else to, so Gei obliges. His talent is making people dissappear!
Ataru then finds himself backstage with the others, it turns out that Get has teleported them to his home planet to perform in a music hall, and we end with the Stormtroopers being pelted with rubbish by an audience of weird red aliens…
A perfectly fine episode. The second half is stronger than the first, with the wistful nostalgia being short on laughs. Though that segment is interesting historically, the Rakugo performance as translated had some similarities with some (particularly British) music hall/vaudeville storytelling in terms of subject matter and innuendo, but differences in broadness of delivery. I suspect some of the wordplay is lost in translation though.
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Screenplay: Hirohisa Soda
Storyboard: Yumiko Suda
Director: Yumiko Suda
Animation Director: Kyoko Kato