Where do I start?

There's a number of things I could bring up about Urusei Yatsura. I guess I'll start with the basics. While Urusei Yatsura has a decent sized cast of main characters, there's also a dizzying number of infrequently and frequently recurring side characters. That tends to happen with long shows. Look at Bleach or LOGH. You've got an array of characters, too. From hopeless womanizer Ataru to whimsical go-go alien princess Lum with a seemingly infinite reservoir of patience but a short fuse, to Ataru's rival Mendou whose pride would never let him admit he's much more like Ataru than he lets on, to Lum's vengeful, spiteful childhood freind Ran and on and on. Attempting to walk through each character individually would be a nightmare.

None of them are very complex, but most come with distinctive, strong personalities that are important to the structure of this show. See, Urusei Yatsura is an episodic series that cares little for continuity. Bring in the factor of aliens to open up any fictional scientific avenue your story requires, and Urusei Yatsura gets to function as what it truly is: just a platform. You see, you can actually just discard or temporarily ignore what seem like key elements for the sake of an episode. In Urusei Yatsura, the creators could basically do whatever they wanted. They could craft any situation and just throw some of their vast array of characters in or introduce a new one, and they were good to go. The result is a bit of a mixed bag. You have pretty good episodes and pretty bad episodes, with many falling somewhere between those two quality levels. This also allows some episodes of Urusei Yatsura to depart from the comedic formula entirely, bringing you odd, out of place feeling philosophical moments.

You also get a number of different episode directors producing something that isn't wildly divergent from episode to episode, but there's a certain disconnect. Things are largely the same, but just different enough among various episodes to not quite feel like the same show. This seems like it should result in refreshing variance, but actually produces something akin to an uncanny valley.

This show has a very rough early batch of episodes. Everything (and I do mean everything) improves later on, but it's a bumpy ride. The early art is awful. Just pause around here in the first ED and take a look at Lum's face. What is that? It makes Lum look more like an animal than some kind of humanoid alien. You can imagine what the art in the show looks like. These crude, malformed drawings give way to much more competent designs. One test for character designs was proposed by Matt Groening. You ought to be able to to recognize a character from just their silhouette. Does Urusei Yatsura pass? You tell me. (Yes.)

While you can spot a number of animation errors during the show (a briefly bald Kintaro, a moment where Sakura is talking but they're still animating Shinobu's mouth flaps the whole time, etc.), what you ultimately come away with is a sense of love for the craft. Crammed with blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual gags and a number of moments that go beyond the strictly necessary, you can feel the effort. The animation isn't cutting edge for its time, as you might expect of the temporal and budgetary realities facing a series this long, but it's still fully functional and has its small joys. You can forgive the occasional bit of looped or recycled animation and uses of tricks to keep the budget down.

To a degree, Urusei Yatsura gets repetitive. While the writing picks up from its dire early condition, you're still seeing a lot of the same ideas play out in different scenarios. Urusei Yatsura is a bad idea to marathon. Rather, it has a benefit of being very low commitment viewing. If you feel like watching something but aren't really in the mood to watch less episodic titles, Urusei Yatsura is palatable enough and simple enough that sure, you can just watch an episode or two and not really think anything of it.

You may be familiar with Urusei Yatsura as a series that helped launch the careers of famous directors. Here's a list of episode directors. You've indeed probably heard of Mamoru Oshii. But do you honestly know who Masuji Harada, Tamiko Kojima or Keiji Hayakawa are? Possibly, but probably not. Let's dissuade ourselves of this notion of Urusei Yatsura as some font of famous directors.

If you believe the stories, Oshii was kicked out for taking Urusei Yatsura in directions the original mangaka didn't approve of. A pity, since some of the more interesting episodes were ones he directed. The show does make a small but noticeable shift towards its latter half, but is ultimately still recognizable despite the shuffling of directors.

While there's more music in this series than you'll even realize, your'e still going to hear some of the same songs very often. To be fair, 195 episodes would require a substantial amount of music to remain consistently fresh and there's certainly valid applications for reuse of music. However, the songs in question are ones you'll hear in most episodes and then you notice it as "this again." And instead of working as background music to enhance a scene, it has now distracted you and pulled you out of the show. It's not just tedious, but actively diminishes your enjoyment.

While it would help to have a basic understanding of Japanese mythology and historical literature (nothing you can't pick up in a semester), you don't actually need to. There will always be more to a show of such a length than I could reasonably begin to comment on, but the reality of Urusei Yatsura is that it's a simple, light, easily accessible series that isn't great, but works well as a sort of anime "snack" between meals. It's just so easily watchable. Don't even think of it as committing yourself to watching a long series. Just watch individual episodes whenever you're bored or the mood stikes. It will offer small chuckles and a quick, disposable dose of diversion. It's no must-see, but certainly something you could work into your main anime diet. A low seven.

EDIT: And of course less than two months after I finish watching this show that came out decades ago, they announce a BD release (for a scant $1800). No way I'm rewatching all of this just because of HD, but unless they screw it up badly that should be a nice upgrade for the show. So those of you with this still in your backlog might not have to put up with all the ghosting, rainbowing, macroblocking and general master course in encoding flaws that is the current DVD batch. I'd say it's too bad the movies/OVAs aren't getting the same treatment, but CDJapan says the fourth box includes up to episode 218, which doesn't exist of course, so anything's possible.

Well, maybe if I ever watch Maison Ikkoku someday, since that's getting a BD too (so is Ranma). But I'm not even fully done with Urusei Yatsura yet.

All below was written while watching the show.
***

.So this isn't something on the show's end, but the subs here are kind of odd !They tend to place the punctuation at the beginning of the sentence ?What's up with that

(It is surprisingly distracting.)

Ugh. This feels like everything wrong with 80's comedy. No subtlety, entirely over-the-top in the wrong way. And, oh great, it already looks like a male punching bag MC with dumb gags. And there's only 195 episodes of this gold! I hope it stops being terrible soon. I'm not masochistic enough to watch ~80 hours of garbage.

(And don't start with any "it was good for its time" or "but it was influential!" arguments. I don't care if it was influential, that doesn't change the quality. And even if you think it was good for its time, I live in 2012. I can go watch a good show without having to compromise my standards in some false notion of "fairness.")

***

Right. So a few more episodes in, and I don't know that I'd call this "good." Maybe something more like "not awful?" It feels like its constant repetition of the same jokes is going to get old pretty soon. There's some very noticeable and fundamental problems with this show, at least six episodes in.

I have no idea if I'll actually watch all of the 189 remaining episodes, but I'm not dropping it yet. I do hope it moves away from this "monster of the week" type format and expands the show a bit more, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

(Oh, and there's apparently a sub track that doesn't have that punctuation oddity, but it's vobsub, which is unpleasant. And there's a third one that seems to be some kind of Morse code, which can't be right. Then again, Puni Puni Poemy had a pig latin sub track.)