Disco Inferno (ディスコ・インフェルノ, "Disuko Inferuno"?) is the 19th chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.
Summary[]
An invitation to the disco from the beautiful Sakura is actually a secret plot to exploit Ataru's magnetic attraction to weirdness on behalf of her sorcerer fiance, Tsubame.
Plot Overview[]
A quiet evening at the Moroboshi household is interrupted when Sakura arrives and invites Ataru and Lum to come out with her to a disco. Surprised but excited, the two accept. On the way, they meet up with a strange man; Tsubame Ozuno, Sakura's long-absent fiance. Ataru gets suspicious, especially when Cherry turns out to be waiting at the disco, but Lum just wants to dance with him. As it transpires, Cherry has demanded that Tsubame prove worthy of Sakura's hand by displaying his skills at wielding magic; Sakura brought Ataru and Lum along hoping to stack the deck with Ataru's uncanny ability to attract spirits. Chaos promptly ensues, for even with Ataru as a lodestone, Tsubame isn't the most competent wizard. Still, his power is sufficient enough that Cherry finally gives the engagement his blessings.
Characters in Order of Appearance[]
Trivia[]
- The title of this chapter is taken from the 1976 disco song released by American disco band The Trammps.
- Disco became extremely popular when it reached Japan from America, hence why the plot of this chapter revolves around the protagonists visiting a disco club. Some sources suggest that disco retained its popularity in Japan through the 80s and into the 90s, whereas it died out around the end of the 70s in its birthplace of America.
- This chapter marks the debut of Sakura's fiancé, Tsubame Ozuno.
- In the panel where Lum and Ataru start dancing, the protagonists of Takahashi's short story Shake Your Buddha (がんばり末世), Daisuke Goko and the Maitreya Buddha, can be seen dancing behind them.
- The pun of Tsubame's first botched summon is, of course, that Satan and Santa are anagrams for each other.
- With Tsubame's second botched summon, the joke in the original is the similarities between the Japanese words for "devil" (Akuma, 悪魔), and "bear" (Kuma, 熊), emphasized by the reaction of the nameless background character to the bear sitting atop Ataru - "Ah, kuma!" (literally "Ah! A bear!") is a Japanese homophone for "Akuma". Viz Media's English translation tries to carry over the joke by having Tsubame ask Cherry and Sakura to "bare with him" before he makes his summon, thus evoking the English homophone of bare vs. bear.
- Tsubame's attempted third summon is Baphomet the Sabbatic Goat, a popular icon of Western occultism with roots dating back into the tail end of the 11th century, with the earliest known reference being in a letter about the siege of Antioch written by the French Crusader Anselm of Ribemont around July 1098.
- When Tsubame and Cherry begin their summoning duel, Tsubame starts by summoning Dracula, the Frankenstein's Monster, and a werewolf; icons of European gothic horror and widely regarded as the three pillars of the so-called Universal Classic Monsters, a loose franchise of horror movies created by Universal Pictures in the 1930s through to the 1950s.
- Cherry's response to Tsubame's first conjuration is to summon three human figures clad in archaic Japanese clothing riding atop a toad, a snail and a snake. These are meant to be the three protagonists of the famous 1839 folkstory Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari (児雷也豪傑物語; “The Heroic Tales of Jiraiya” or “Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya”); Tsukikage Orochimaru, Ogata Jiraiya, and Matsuura Tsunade. Names that would later become iconic to Western fans of anime and manga through the series Naruto.
- Tsubame's second summons in his duel, "Super Batman", is obviously a portmanteau of two of the most famous Western superheroes; Superman and Batman.
- Cherry's response to "Super Batman" is a horse-riding man he calls "Kurama Tengu" (鞍馬天狗, Kurama Tengu); whilst this is the name of a famous Noh play about how the young samurai Minamoto no Yoshitsune was tutored by a daitengu named Sōjōbō, and which inspired a recurring demon/persona in the Shin Megami Tensei videogame series, Cherry is specifically referring to the masked heroic protagonist of a novel of the same name written by Jirō Osaragi, which received several live action adaptations, including silent film adaptations in the 1920s, a voiced but black-and-white film adaptation in the 1950s, and TV series in 1979 and 1990.
- The army of intermingled Japanese and Western spirits that Cherry and Tsubame summon contain myriad recognizable creatures from folklore, including vampires, Medusa/gorgons, kasa-obake, chochin-obake, centaurs, cyclopses, devils, and the protagonists of Journey to the West.
- Eagle-eyed readers can spot several Urusei Yatsura cameo characters across the last two pages; Dappya-Monsters, the Mirror Imp, the Space Taxi Driver, Happy-Go-Lucky (the oni-like being from the world-in-an-egg that Ataru hatched), Benten and Oyuki. There's even a foreshadowing; the fox-like alien drunkard from Chapter 27 can be seen in the final panel, hovering at the top of the page behind the DJs alongside a kasa-obake.
- Twice in the chapter, a DJ refers to playing "disco folk". In the original Japanese, what they instead say is that they will play a "Disco Hakata Dance" (ディスコ博多甚句/disco Hakata jinku). This a compound of the English loan word "disco", the original name for Fukuoka province "Hakata", and the Japanese word "Jinku" (甚句), meaning "a lively song or dance".