English Dub Review: Urusei Yatsura “Mendo Siblings!! / A Strange New Year At The Mendo Estate”

Overview:

What’s this? A handkerchief? It smells divine, so it MUST belong to a total hottie. Definitely not a nightmare creature or anything like that. Ataru’s nose cannot be fooled!

Our Take:

I have to say that the ox cart gag in this has to be one of my favorites. For those that don’t know, for whatever reason Mendo’s mother (and sister apparently) travel by ox cart which takes about five days to get to his school. In this case, Mendo’s sister, Ryoko, brought Mendo his lunch from Monday… on Friday. It was all sashimi and spoiled seafood that would have been good on Monday but unfortunately, ox cart isn’t fast.

As you can probably guess I was extremely disappointed with this episode because not only did Ataru regress back to how he was but he somehow got even worse. I don’t want to beat a dead horse but Ataru makes this show almost unbearable. I thought Maison Ikkoku had an annoying protagonist but this might be Takahashi’s worst protagonist ever. I understand the womanizer trope well but it needs to at least make sense. He will literally go from hitting on someone to someone else in the same breath. He’s just annoying and I am starting to lose faith that it will change anytime soon. This was the last episode of “season one” but if the HiDive calender is anything to go by then we will go straight into the next season with no break. Oh boy, can’t wait…