Trivia / Urusei Yatsura

• Acting for Two: The English dubs have this.
  • In Beautiful Dreamer, Wayne Grayson plays both Ataru and Shuutaro.
  • In the other five movies, Shannon Settlemeyer plays Lum and Jariten.
• Approval of God: Ataru and Lum's respective voice actors for the 1981 anime, Toshio Furukawa and Fumi Hirano, gave Hiroshi Kamiya and Sumire Uesaka high praise for portraying their characters in the 2022 anime.
• Breakthrough Hit: The manga was this for Rumiko Takahashi, as it was her first serialized work and it proved to be a very successful debut.
• B-Team Sequel: This happened during the series. Animation production switched from Studio Pierrot to Studio DEEN starting on episode 107.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: During the 80s.
• Casting Gag: Ataru's father and Lum's mother in the 2022 anime are voiced by Ataru and Lum's original voice actors from the 1981 version.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Machiko Washio is primarily known for her live action work, and this show is one of the few anime she's done throughout her long career spanning 57 years, Sakura in particular being the closest she's had to a main role in an anime.
• Colbert Bump: The series (and anime as a whole) gained increased exposure in the United States after Lum got a starring role in the music video for Matthew Sweet's 1991 single "I've Been Waiting". The song might even be about her. Sweet is a fan of the series and has a tattoo of Lum.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Cantonese, 山T 女福星 (ET Lucky Female Alien)
  • The BBC TV airing: "Lum the Invader Girl"
  • Viz titled their first release of the manga simply "Lum" and their second, "The Return of Lum." The new 2019 release uses the original title.
  • AnimEigo's test dub of the series was called "Those Obnoxious Aliens."
  • Animax's dub was apparently broadcast in some countries (such as Hong Kong and Singapore) as "Lamu the Invader Girl," and it went out in India as "Alien Musibat."
  • In Brazil, the anime was called "Turma do Barulho", whose title is (in context) very accurate to the original and may be considered a pun. Its literal translation is something like "Team of the Noise", and the original title plays with the expression "urusai" (noisy, loud).
  • The Italian dub of the original series was called "Lamù la ragazza dello spazio" ("Lum the girl from space"), while the 2022 series became "Lamù e i casinisti planetari" ("Lum and the planetary nuisances")
• Creator Backlash: Mamoru Oshii is not proud of the first movie. He stated that it is not a movie, just an ordinary episode stretched to 100 minutes and with a larger budget.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Jariten in pretty much every language, including the original.
  • In Spain, the series was dubbed in Castilian and Catalonian. In the Catalonian dub, Ataru was dubbed by a woman, Carme Capdet. Ditto for France where he's voiced by Marie-Laure Beneston.
    • As further curiosity, Mrs. Capdet dubbed Dragon Ball's Chi-Chi in the very first Dragon Ball story arc (then she got "promoted" to be Lunch's voice for the rest of the series). Fast-forward several years, and, by the Androids' arc, Chi-Chi is voiced by Lum's Catalonian voice actress (who still does play her on DB Super): Isabel Muntané. That is: The Catalonian dub's Chi-Chi has had both Ataru and Lum's voices.
  • Ataru was voiced by Candice Moore in the obscure Animax English dub of the TV series.
• Disowned Adaptation: Rumiko Takahashi apparently disliked the second movie.
• Dueling Dubs:
  • AnimEigo dubbed the first two episodes of the series in 1995 and released them on VHS before discontinuing the adaptation due to low sales and poor reception.
  • BBC 3 did a Gag Dub of episodes 1 and 3 in 1998.
  • An English dub by Animax Asia titled "Lamu the Invader Girl" ("Alien Musibat" in India) allegedly dubbed the entire series, although episodes from it are difficult to come by other than some clips.
  • There is also an account of a macekred earlier Alaskan dub called Cosma the Invader Girl, but no clips have ever surfaced and some have theorized that it may be a hoax.
  • AnimEigo handled the dub work for all movies (with a mostly different cast from their test dub) except Beautiful Dreamer, which was instead dubbed by Central Park Media (though AE still did the subtitle work for it to maintain consistency).
• Enforced Method Acting: Michael Sinterniklaas has said that the reason he managed to channel the wimpiness needed for his performance as Ataru in the AnimEigo dub is that he was genuinely terrified of one of his costars, who was also a police officer and had his gun with him in the studio at the time.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The first movie, "Only You", fell victim to this, which might explain its wonky pacing and unusually high number of musical cues.
  • Although "Beautiful Dreamer", the second movie, mostly averted the meddling, apparently Rumiko Takahashi was displeased with it and it may have led to Mamoru Oshii's departure from the show, but this hasn't been completely confirmed over the years.
  • Also, Rumiko's editors (aided by overwhelming fan support) forced her to bring back Lum, who was originally intended to be a one-shot antagonist. This inspired Rumiko to switch the Official Couple from Ataru/Shinobu to Ataru/Lum, as her original plan for the series was to keep it a short, episodic, purely comedy focused story with no real romantic elements.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • AnimEigo held the license to the anime – which included the show, the OVAs, and all but one of the movies – until it expired in 2011 after two decades (that's an eternity in the anime licensing world). The one movie they didn't have, "Beautiful Dreamer", belonged to a company that went bankrupt in 2009, and copies of it are increasingly difficult to find as well.
  • And then Discotek Media released a Blu-ray of Beautiful Dreamer in 2017, with the other movies following, beginning in 2021. This all eventually lead to them finally licensing the TV series in 2022.
  • AnimEigo's test dub, "Those Obnoxious Aliens," was never reissued after the initial VHS release.
  • The BBC Gag Dub only ever aired once and was never released on home video (it was The '90s after all) or DVD. Ratty home recordings of it and uploads to certain video sites are all that exist now.
  • On the Japanese Blu-ray version of the first movie, 12 minutes between the prologue and the opening are cut out for some reason, but are reinserted for the US Blu-ray.
  • Animax's dub is lost outside recordings of a few episodes and some clips that have surfaced online. It's not even clear how many episodes it covered.
  • The Brazilian Portuguese dub of the anime is very obscure as only the first two episodes were aired on television and also those same single episodes were released through home video (via VHS), and worst, it was edited as if it had four episodes included.
  • The 1981 anime has "Episode 22.5"; the first television special, created during the anime's "two stories" format, it combines a first half that recaps the events of the first 21 episodes with a second half that adapts a three-chapter storyline from the early manga about Ataru's class taking a trip to Kyoto, where they encounter a young kunoichi who wishes to quit her ninja clan. This episode is not included in the AnimEigo DVD collection, and is extremely hard to find offline.
• Late Export for You:
  • While Urusei Yatsura has its fans in North America and the UK (enough for AnimEigo to spend the better part of 15 years translating every single bit of anime), it nonetheless had the unfortunate distinction of being the only Takahashi series to not have the original manga fully adapted into English – Viz put out a few chapters but then dropped it (possibly because its heavy reliance on puns and wordplay makes it a nightmare to translate). It's also the only Takahashi series whose anime was not fully dubbed – only the movies have a widely-available English track.^note The first few episodes of the TV series were dubbed twice – a US-made dub and a UK-made Gag Dub – but the latter only aired once and the former only appeared on an ancient VHS release (and was quickly dropped for lack of sales and poor reception). From 2019 to 2023, Viz translated and released the entire manga in seventeen volumes. It only took forty years.
  • Despite the 1981 anime series being a cult classic in Spain, it was very unknown in Latin America until the All-Star remake was licensed by Sentai Filmworks for a Latin American release in September 2022. In addition to that, HIDIVE, Sentai's streaming service, releases the subtitled chapters in Spanish and Portuguese shortly after the episode's premiere.
• Licensed Game: Quite a few over the years, the first one released as early as 1982. One partial inversion: the arcade game Momoko 120% (1986) was intended as an Urusei Yatsura game, but had to be redeveloped when the producers were unable to secure the license, even though it retained "Lum's Love Song" as the BGM. The developers finally were able to license the franchise for the Nintendo Famicom port, which was released as Urusei Yatsura: Lum no Wedding Bell.
• Meaningful Release Date: All-Stars premiered on October 14, 2022, the 41st anniversary of the first anime (October 14, 1981) and a few weeks after the 44th anniversary of the manga's serialization (September 24, 1978). Fittingly enough, 2022 is also the Year of the Tiger, since Lum wears a tiger stripe bikini.
• Milestone Celebration: All Stars was first announced in celebration of Shogakukan's 100th anniversary in January 2022.
• No Export for You:
  • North America got DVD releases of every single bit of Lum anime made^note  (except the 2008 Japan-only OVA, of course). The UK, on the other hand, despite being the only English-speaking region to put any of the main series on TV (it was straight-to-video in the US & Canada) saw physical release of five of the six movies, and that was it — "Beautiful Dreamer" was the film that didn't make it across the pond; they also never got any of the OVA's or a video release of the TV series.
  • This trend extends to manga, too. Various manga publishers in Latin America don't want to edit Urusei Yatsura due to how unknown it is. Even after a question asked to a publisher in Argentina about the possibility of publishing the manga in Spanish, the manager indicated that they were simply not interested in putting out something that was never popular in the region.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The "Deranged Marriage" arc has Lum's father throwing a huge party and inviting potential suitors from across the galaxy in an attempt to shift Lum's affections away from Ataru. All the character designs for the suitors were submitted by fans, and they even come with tags or badges showing the name and age of the fan who designed them.
• The Other Darrin:
  • In the 1981 anime:
    • Ran was originally voiced by You Inoue for the first half of the 1981 series, but due to her frequently going on trips overseas, the character was voiced by Kazue Komiya for the rest of the series.
    • Although Issei Futamata is best known for voicing Chibi, Tomohiro Nishimura voiced the character in his appearances in episodes 1, 3, and 5.
    • Megane is usually voiced by Shigeru Chiba, but Naoki Tatsuta filled in for episode 3 when Chiba was absent.
    • The late Takuya Fujioka replaced Mujaki's regular voice actor, Kenichi Ogata, for Beautiful Dreamer.
    • Tobimiro was originally voiced by Kazuhiko Inoue in his first appearance. In all subsequent appearances, he was voiced by Bin Shimada.
  • The AnimEigo dubs of the movies (except for Beautiful Dreamer, which had already been dubbed by Central Park Media, and was not redubbed) were done several years after they attempted to dub the TV series, resulting in replacing the whole cast, although the only one who reprised his role was Eric Paisley as Cherry. Beautiful Dreamer, the BBC's Lum the Invader Girl Gag Dub, and Animax's Alien Musibat dub, of course, all featured entirely different stables of English voice actors.
  • The Italian dub of the series went through multiple recasts during its run. The actual dub was technically split into three blocks, the first two dubbed in the 80's and the third one in 2006, and each of them not only had completely different voice casts, but in each of them at least one or two characters changed voice one or more times. Adding to this the four episodes that had to be redubbed in the 2000's because the original audio tracks were lost and the movies, this means that each of the main characters had from four (Lum) to thirteen (Megane) different voice actors during the show's whole run.
  • For the pachinko games and slot machine games that were released during the Turn of the Millennium, everyone besides Fumi Hirano (Lum) was recast.
  • In the 2008 OVA, Tōru Ōkawa voices Ryuunosuke's dad instead of Masahiro Anzai, who retired in 1997.
  • Due to the All-Stars adaptation premiering over 40 years after the first one, everyone was inevitably recast, both living and dead:
    • Hiroshi Kamiya voices Ataru Moroboshi instead of Toshio Furukawa, who took over for Kenichi Ogata as the character's father.
    • Sumire Uesaka voices Lum instead of Fumi Hirano, who took over for Reiko Yamada as the character's mother.
    • Maaya Uchida voices Shinobu Miyake instead of Saeko Shimazu.
    • Miyuki Sawashiro voices Sakura instead of Machiko Washio.
    • Mamoru Miyano voices Shutaro Mendo instead of Akira Kamiya.
    • Wataru Takagi voices Cherry instead of Ichirō Nagai, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 2014.
    • Katsuyuki Konishi voices Rei instead of Tesshō Genda.
    • Takahiro Sakurai voices Tsubame Ozuno instead of Kazuhiko Inoue.
    • Saori Hayami voices Oyuki instead of Noriko Ohara.
    • Shizuka Ishigami voices Benten instead of Yuko Mita.
    • Nana Mizuki voices Princess Kurama instead of Rihoko Yoshida, who retired in 2008.
    • Kana Hanazawa voices Ran instead of the late You Inoue and Kazue Komiya.
    • Kenta Miyake voices Onsen-Mark instead of Michihiro Ikemizu.
    • Keiko Toda voices Ataru's mother instead of Natsumi Sakuma.
    • Rikiya Koyama voices Lum's father instead of Ritsuo Sawa.
    • Aoi Yūki voices Ten instead of Kazuko Sugiyama.
    • Ayahi Takagaki voices Ryunosuke Fujinami instead of Mayumi Tanaka.
    • Misaki Kuno voices Sugar instead of TARAKO.
    • Chitose Morinaga voices Ginger instead of Chika Sakamoto.
    • Rie Takahashi voices Pepper instead of Rumiko Ukai.
  • For Sentai's English dub of the All-Stars anime, everyone was inevitably recast.
• Promoted Fanboy: Many of the cast for the All-Stars adaptation are massive Urusei Yatsura fans:
  • Hiroshi Kamiya grew up with Rumiko Takahashi's works, as well as Urusei Yatsura.
  • As a high school student, Sumire Uesaka collected Lum figurines and frequently watched the 1981 series.
  • Maaya Uchida is a fan of Rumiko Takahashi's female characters.
  • Mamoru Miyano grew up watching the original series since he was a child.
  • Kana Hanazawa is a massive Urusei Yatsura fan, having watched the original series since she was a child.
  • Katsuyuki Konishi saw Urusei Yatsura in the theaters as a youth.
  • Nana Mizuki is an Urusei Yatsura fan, citing Princess Kurama as one of her favorite characters.
  • Kenta Miyake cited Urusei Yatsura as the first school romantic comedy series that he watched during his childhood.
  • Saori Hayami was an Urusei Yatsura fan before she was brought onto All-Stars.
  • Takahiro Sakurai grew up with Urusei Yatsura since he was an elementary school student.
  • For the English dub of the 2023 anime, independent Vtuber COQUI, a massive fan of the series, was cast as the voice of Ten under the name of "Coqui Saporana". She describes the casting as a "dream come true".
• Typecasting: For the third time, Noriko Ohara is a beautiful alien woman.
• Shown Their Work: Sort of. Ataru's official birthday is April 13th. It's also stated he was born on a Friday (thus ticking off every possible bad-luck-box one can). Knowing the manga began in 1978 and assuming Ataru is 16 at the beginning of the series... April 13th, 1962 was indeed a Friday. No information on whether Japan suffered an earthquake that day.
  • Although Ataru is also said to have been born on Butsumetsu, which is considered to be the most unlucky day in the old Japanese lunar calendar because it was the day the Buddha died. If one includes Butsumetsu, all the various unlucky elements of Ataru's birthday come together every 50 years. The last time was in 2001, and before that 1951. Hence, taken literally, Urusei Yatsura would take place either in the late 1960s or the late 2010s.
• Star-Making Role: Several veteran Japanese voice actors started in the 1981 series, and some of them were quickly picking up popularity, especially Toshio Furukawa (Ataru; previously best known as Kai Shiden in Mobile Suit Gundam) and Fumi Hirano (Lum). Saeko Shimazu (Shinobu) and Akira Kamiya (Shuutaro) would both land starring roles in other big series later in the decade… while UY was still running, leading to shout-outs. Also noteworthy is the presence of Mayumi Tanaka (Ryuunosuke), now better known for voicing the lead in another extremely popular long-running series. Even Mami Koyama and Sumi Shimamoto show up in supporting roles. It's probably shorter to list the voice actors who didn't do anything after this.
  • One of the few voice actors in the main cast who was well known before this was Ichirō Nagai (Cherry) due to his role on Sazae-san (a part he continued to play until his death). Another was Kazuko Sugiyama (Ten), already famous for playing Heidi and Jun the Swan among others; she's still active today although in her 70s.
• Studio Hop:
  • The 1981-86 anime and movies were produced by Studio Pierrot and Studio DEEN, some of the '80s and early '90s OVAs and movies were done by Madhouse, and the 2008 OVA was made by Sunrise. For the 2022 All-Stars anime, David Production took over animation duties.
  • At first, the North American home media releases of the 1981 TV series and films were handled by AnimEigo, before switching to Discotek Media.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ataru and Shinobu were originally supposed to be the Official Couple in the manga (note Lum’s absence in the second manga story). The readers — and Takahashi’s editor — preferred Lum more, so the latter was made the female protagonist and paired her with Ataru.
  • When the 2022 anime reboot was announced, Shannon Settlemyer, who voiced Lum in the English dub of six of the movies, expressed interest in returning.

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