urusei yatsura because i need more motivation to watch it

Urusei Yatsura is awesome and a lot of talented anime industry people in the 80s worked on it, like Mamoru Oshii (who directed the first half and later went on to direct the second UY film Beautiful Dreamer, you probably already know about him), Yuji Moriyama (Project A-Ko, Cat Girl Nuku Nuku), or Akemi Takada who is famous for Kimagure Orange Road’s character design, etc. Of course, you already know Toshio Furukawa does the voice of Ataru Moroboshi and he’s got great vocal range so it’s hilarious to hear him switch from sounding annoying and stupid to “sexy” in the matter of seconds.

As for the series itself, it’s episodic and the good news is that Animeigo, who had the rights to the series (and whose releases were super expensive, all of their stuff that I own was acquired in second-hand stores) went under, so now the series is in licensing limbo and you can watch it in its entirety on youtube. The weird thing about it is that the first season or two was formatted so that you get two completely different fifteen minute stories per episode, kind of like two episodes in one. I haven’t really seen that done much in anime, but they dropped that format pretty quickly. Anyway the music is great, the voice acting is great, the sound effects are great, it’s one of the few anime that actually make me laugh (though a lot of jokes fall flat if you don’t know enough about Japanese culture or get references to other popular anime at the time), and I love how cracked out it is most of the time.

A few episodes I can recommend, after having personally seen them and enjoyed them, are the first one (well, the plot of the series as a whole is thin but it might be good to watch the first episode since it establishes the whole premise of Ataru and Lum’s relationship), episode 68 (the sex change cannon episode), episode 61 (because you get to see a guy in a Zaku mask fight a dude in… I think it was a Darth Vader mask), and episode 78 (one of the most obvious Oshii-directed episodes, it’s basically all about Ataru’s mom and it’s really weird). Also, I think episode 39 is considered to be the best among Japanese fans. The OVAs are great, especially if you want to see better animation (Kitty Film also did the Cream Lemon hentai series so they made a lot of money off of those that they were able to funnel into other projects like UY and Project A-Ko). I liked Inaba the Dreammaker a lot, but the others are fun too. Definitely watch the first three movies, especially Beautiful Dreamer which transcends the whole series by going in a totally different direction (which pissed off a lot of fans at the time).

In short, you could just get on youtube and watch random episodes and see if you like it at all. The movies and OVAs are a good place to start too. I hope this was helpful because I tend to ramble a lot about Urusei Yatsura since it’s my favorite Takahashi series