Classical Lupin Variations: Episodes 89, 96, & 98

89 Play the Thief’s Symphony



Here we have another “Lupin cracks an impossible safe” episode, but one with a classical twist. The vault is completely activated by microphone so to thwart it Lupin will use…Beethoven?

Admittedly it’s not his first choice. After scoping out the vault he sends himself into the desert (apparently Monument Valley, though I suppose one could argue for the Chaîne de Puys in a stretch) to work on a noise-canceling machine. In an (unintentional) echo of John Cage’s observation that you could never have complete quiet due to the hum of your own body, Lupin’s machine can’t manage to cancel out the hum of its own monitor. Lupin nonetheless manages to get the nineteenth-century French radical look down, though.



So he goes into the safe armed with his favorite piece of classical music: Beethoven’s Eroica. The reasoning’s a bit unclear—does it just overwhelm the speakers? Does the ingenious safe recognize Eroica as a sympathetic work of genius? Or is the sympathetic genius Lupin’s mind, which lately has only been able to fall to sleep with Eroica playing in the background (the episode hints at the first and then the second).

It doesn’t quite make intuitive sense, though it works anyway—perhaps watching the second series has warped my suspension of disbelief, but I think it’s because by this point the show’s settled into as much of a groove as it would (controlling for subcontracting studios, of course)—everything is executed so smoothly the so-out-there-it’s-almost-charming mechanics of using Eroica don’t matter.

Apart from the classical music/white noise element it’s not a stand-out episode, but one that does all the standard stuff well. Lupin does some stuff with balloons, like he’s done before, but it’s done well. Zenigata’s appearance is great. More interesting is the inclusion of a bit of an anti-nuclear message, something reaching all the way back to the third episode of the first series—the safe’s secret is an unshielded nuclear reactor that kills with gamma rays, allowing for an expressionistic death scene along the lines of the fantasy guillotining in “The Wind is Hot in Morocco”.

Nothing new, but interpreted well. Like a nice recording of Beethoven.

Recommended?
Yes—if the second series weren’t subject to the near-industrial production schedule I imagine this would have been a sort of “average” episode for this series, and it’s quite nice.

Stray Observation
•  In this episode Fujiko has a POODLE! If there’s one animal I’m less objective about than PENGUINS it’s POODLES. Honestly the whole opening scene probably sets me up to like this episode.
•  Unfortunately Lupin does rattle a pursuing guard dog, pounding on the oil drum he traps him in. Probably his most asshole-ish moment in any of this series.

96 Lupin’s Gourmet Heaven



This is another of the more overtly silly ones, and one that gets a bit too silly for my taste. Still, it deserves some note for its overt stylization—Lupin is at his stringiest (special note is made of this, and the contrast with the fat that must be in his brain) and most simian, the villain is hulking and fatty, and Fujiko’s at her most cantilevered (look at that hair!). The abstraction this episode is impressive (all the more so when these characters move around with some degree of naturalism), even if the style isn’t quite to my taste (I’ve said this before).

It doesn’t just go too far in terms of silly humor, though—the plot involves a criminal boss wanting to eat Lupin. This is a great setup, and the episode really exploits it, cutting things very close. Uncomfortably close. Surprisingly uncomfortably close, which is a feat since we know Lupin won’t really end up someone’s entré. It’s actually quite an accomplishment, even if it makes for cringe-y viewing.

Recommended?
Strangely yes—even if I didn’t really like the episode’s humor it’s impressively suspenseful.

Stray Observation



•  This is almost totally a Lupin and Fujiko episode, with a brief couple of vignettes of Goemon (slicing cup ramen lids with his sword) and Jigen, who’s sautéing something on his own and once again proving himself a master of small pleasures. We also climb another rung up the Kinsey scale as Jigen says to himself, “I can’t understand a man who can enjoy a meal in the company of a woman.”

98 The Day without Daddio



Having seen Lupin and Fujiko get their chance to die and come back, we have our conclusion in this little informal trilogy with Zenigata getting the same treatment in another variation on the theme.

Like Fujiko’s installment we’re tipped off pretty early that something’s off—Zenigata’s apparently assassinated by a French policeman while chasing Lupin, but soon the assassin is killed by Truffaut, an ambitious ICPO bureaucrat. The policeman’s final words indicate that Zenigata isn’t dead, giving the audience an advantage over Lupin and the gang.

Lupin doesn’t really believe Zenigata’s dead either, but he also expects Zenigata to be in on the ruse. When Lupin mistakenly concludes Zenigata for dead (the incredibly powerful tranquilizers are up there with the unusually effective disguises as something you just have to roll with in this series) he embarks on what he thinks might be his last theft—of Zenigata’s body. In Lupin’s estimation, if he’s going to finally be captured or killed by ICPO it might as well be in a blaze of glory.



Again, there are little bits and devices you’ll recognize from other episodes, but the appeal of “The Day without Daddio” is the skill in which they are arranged and, in the uncovering of the conspiracy, taken apart. It’s also one of the more visually striking Lupin III Part II installments, really making use of its Paris setting to add texture to the background (no monuments, just the cityscape). The extra emotion surrounding Zenigata’s “death” allows them to pitch everything a little bit higher.

Recommended?
Yes—this is certainly the best of the fake-out death trilogy.

Stray Observation
•  In addition to variations on a theme we also get legitimate self-reference in this episode. Although the episode’s mostly serious we do have a cameo from the trampoline truck from the first series episode “First Move Wins the Computer Operation”.

•  Zenigata’s coffin initially is placed before a cross—is this a side-effect of being shot in France or is he Christian? We also get the Japanese national anthem at his funeral, which is appropriately solemn and dignified with a slightly goofy Zenigata photo—perfect!

•  This is the final episode from Oh Pro animation, another subcontracting studio that did work of high quality. Though a lot of it was stuck in gimmicky earlier-season episodes I wasn’t so fond of and they don’t have any sort of auteurist connections, I have reviewed a few of their episodes (“Can I Hear Nessie’s Song?,” “Lupin Cornered,” Killing Smells Like Wine”).

•  In keeping with our theme-and-variations motif this week, Episode 92, “Quartet for Madam & Thief” is another, Oh Pro episode, and one of the more overt cinematic homages, the first half being a condensed version of The Ladykillers complete with string quartet with nice little leitmotifs for each character (can’t recall all them at the moment but Fujiko’s given Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme). It’s also one of the few episodes not available for (legal) streaming online, I assume because of music rights.



•  Naming the villain Truffaut’s definitely an homage (there are many, many little cinematic homages peppered throughout this series), though it’s little more than just a little reference and not terribly tied to the story. There’s something a bit Hitchcockian, in the broadest possible sense, in the plot, but if we’re going to find a commection it’s in Truffaut’s “A guy, a girl, and a gun” comment, though it’s more homosocial here.

Next week we have more guys and guns story with “Fighting Jigen” and finally move from subtext to text with “Fervent Love at Versailles.” This will finish our coverage of the third season as we head into the final stretch by starting selected episodes of the fourth season next week.[/a]