Roger Smith (the twin of Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne, complete with mansion, loyal butler Norman and the Big O giant mechanical man replacing the Batmobile) is a public Negotiator. In episode 1, he is hired as the go-between in a kidnapping to deliver the ransom and get a rich industrialist's daughter back. There are doublecrosses on both sides, and the rescued Dorothy turns out to be a robot good enough to pass for human. She was presumably built by her industrialist "father," who had regained part of his pre-amnesia memory; but Roger knows that the technology level was never high enough to build intelligent robots. With the industrialist murdered, R. Dorothy attaches herself to Roger for lack of anywhere else to go. Roger's effort to learn where R. Dorothy really came from leads him to look increasingly like a 1930s private eye, with Dorothy as his sardonic secretary. Not surprisingly, Dorothy's secret leads to the greater mystery of Paradigm City's lost past.

Urusei Yatsura. © 1981 Kitty Films.

Urusei Yatsura. TV Series, #1.
TV series, 1981-1986. Directors: Mamoru Oshii, Kyoji Harada, Tamiko Kojima. 4 episodes/100 minutes each. Price & format: subtitled; video $24.95, DVD $24.95. Distributor: AnimEigo.

The importance of Urusei Yatsura to anime in general or to the development of its fandom in America, cannot be overestimated. UY began as a comic book by a neophyte cartoonist. Today Rumiko Takahashi is one of the wealthiest women in the world, and her 1978-87 UY comics are internationally available in hundreds of printings. (Takahashi moved on to create other comic-book serials which also became anime mega-hits, notably Maison Ikkoku and Ranma 1/2.) UY's anime version ran as a TV series from October 14, 1981 through March 19, 1986 (197 episodes), and spun off six theatrical features (1983 - 1991), plus eleven direct-to-video releases (1986 - 1991). Many of Japan's current top anime directors and character designers got their start on UY. It was a learning experience for a brand-new animation studio, Studio Pierrot, and it shows, but few productions ever made it more clear how much fun everyone was having. (The goofiest-looking characters in any crowd scene are usually the animators' self-caricatures.) In America, the mostly teenaged fans just discovering anime felt that the mildly raunchy campus humor of UY was tailored especially for them. The comedy soap-opera follows Japanese high-school students after Earth is invaded by friendly aliens, whose tiger-stripe bikini'ed Princess Lum enters Tomobiki High as an exchange student and likes it so much that her alien teen friends decide it is "cool" to join her in Tokyo. Teachers, parents and other adults freak out, but the human and alien boys and girls get along fine. The human teens find all kinds of ways to misuse the space people's sci-fi technology, such as when wannabe-loverboy Ataru Moroboshi uses a galactic photocopy machine to duplicate himself so he can chase numerous girls at the same time. Many of UY's aliens were very thinly disguised parodies of Japanese gods and goddesses, demons, fairy-tale heroes, historical personages and current popular notables; or of the friendly but overwhelming Western culture with its technological innovations. Just as Japanese teens loved seeing themselves portrayed as an in-crowd who are the first to discover the cool aliens, the American fans reveled in being the first to learn and tell their friends about the Japanese cultural origins behind the jokes. (The title, Urusei Yatsura, is a slang pun weakly translated as Those Obnoxious Aliens; any 1980s fan would gladly spend five minutes explaining all the levels of the wordplay.) UY was one of the earliest titles to be illegally subtitled as evolving computer technology made amateur subtitling practical, and one of the first to be licensed commercially by the new American anime specialty companies. AnimEigo has been slowly releasing UY since 1992, at four subtitled episodes per video with extensive notes explaining the cultural background to each joke and identifying the caricatures of Japanese politicians or sports stars. It was up to video volume 25 (episodes #97-#100) by 2000 when the DVD market took off. UY is now starting a new edition on DVD, beginning February 27, 2001 and released at bimonthly intervals. AnimEigo's plan is to keep the 25 videos in print until they are all also on DVD, then continue in DVD format alone.