Shoved into an ominous car on the way home one afternoon, Ataru learns that the fate of the world rests on wrestling Lum, an alien from a race bent on destroying humanity should Ataru fail. He ends up Lum's fiancée.

At the local high school, a host of adolescent fanatics become insane with Lum's absence, the hottie that she is, and so captures and tortures Ataru in the hopes that he will call the inter-stellar buxom blue-head back from her home planet where she is apparently getting a registration card. The group's near cultish efforts get them hijacked by an errant, crooked alien cab driver who charges them the monetary equivalent of all the oil on Earth to ferry them a few blocks home.

Lum's cute, bubbly, sadistic, fire-breathing cousin arrives to join the expanding Moroboshi household, much to the chagrin of an exasperated Ataru.

Uninterested in playing, Lum gives Ten some candy that he soon discovers has mutagenic effects on sparrows, chicks, house flys, etc. Meanwhile, Lum's relentless affection continues to make life difficult for Ataru ... and Shinobu, who feels threatened by Lum.

A soothsayer warns that Ataru's body is susceptible to possession by evil spirits, portending the coming of Rei, the handsome shapeshifter - in a bit of narrative logic that rivals a Steven Segal film in absurdity. Rei, Lum's ex-lover who learned one line of human language, 'will you cook for me,' pines animalistically for her. To deepen her hooks in Ataru and fend off Rei, Lum claims to carry Ataru's child, much to the virginal Ataru's surprise.

Rei, still on Earth after having losing a duel to Ataru, has spent all of his money eating and can't get back to Oni. But he's only interested in returning with Lum anyway, so she can cook for him for the rest of his life. But in his attempts to win her affection, the straight female population of Earth falls in love with him.

Playing around carp streamers, Lum and Ten encounter Kintaro, a youthful, historical Japanese warrior child who totes a battle axe (or at least he's an alien who looks like Kintaro, but really just wants to get back to his spaceship).

Kintaro, part of an inter-galactic class trip, leads the way on a tour of Earth's famous places. But when his teacher wants to visit an Earth pre-school, Kintaro becomes restless, and lives up to his folk hero status to an impressed pre-school student body.

Revered for the seamless infusion of comedy, tenderness, pathos and action in series such as "Ranma 1/2," "Maison Ikkuko" and the Mermaid saga, Rumiko Takahashi unabashedly practices her gag writing blade on the vacuous, somewhat surreal alien invasion sitcom "Urusei Yatsura." Bereft of likeable characters and armed with an eclectic arsenal of hatred, jealousy and insults, Takahashi's plots deliver healthy doses of hilarious non-sequeitors, punchlines and behavioral ticks that rival Jim Carrey's rubbery melodrama.

As Takahashi's first work, an over-educated youthfulness prevails, exposing an exhibition of one-dimensional, self-defeating tragic heroes worth more ridicule than praise. From the outset, the flames of ridicule evaporate human dimensions from the crucible of character leaving the sediments of failure and self-interest at the core of Yatsura's probing themes. Ataru, as cripplingly flirtatious as his girlfriend Shinobu is unreasonably hot-headed, belongs to a family that is ashamed of him, hangs with friends that hate him and suffers from a marital ball and chain who, ironically, steals the notice of every other man on earth. Lum, his perpetually devoted battle-axe, bearing the appropriate fangs and tiger-stripped bikini to belie her extraterrestrial naiveté, systematically dismantles her reluctant husband's life without even once thinking about his needs ... his desires ... his fanciful aspirations. Of course, Ataru is no better, pining for Shinobu yet salivating over every pair of breasts on legs that slide into his field of vision.

Most revelatory of Takahashi's 1981 world view, the year this series aired in Japan, "Gonna Live Like a Man" tells the story of the mythical man-child Kintaro, raised in the wild, conqueror of warriors, who's likeness falls to Earth as part of a cosmic field trip. As he rampages through Japan like an anachronistic Pretty Boy Floyd, robbing every institution with a cash register, his pre-school brethren watch the news coverage fixatedly, analyzing Kinataro's base impulses with a philosophical fatalism - the youth are the only ones to understand the illogical appetite for money as the grounding motivation behind humankind. Moments like this, at once hilarious and sobering, characterize the keen wit that will eventually pervade Takahashi's later works.

But despite the depressing onslaught of unnerving enmity, Yatsura satirizes every Japanese cliché from Godzilla movies to horny schoolboys to ridiculous mythological heroes, setting up gag after gag with the precision of a domino artist. However, while the humor leaks in, poisonously high levels of bitter loathing lace each joke, making it quite easy to laugh yourself sick.