Shounen Club 2014.09.10 Review

Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) is a music variety show hosted by Kawai Fumito of A.B.C-Z and Kiriyama Akito of Johnny’s West that showcases the song-and-dance skills of the Johnny’s Entertainment agency’s most recently debuted groups – A.B.C-Z, Sexy Zone, and Johnny’s West – as well as the agency’s trainees (known as juniors).

The second episode for September begins with A.B.C-Z introducing the theme of the show – 15th anniversary year again, even though I still have no idea how they figure that – and then performing “Legend Story”. Hashimoto-kun’s opening wasn’t quite as striking as before – more muted this time.

Maybe it’s because it’s at the start of the show, but it seemed lacking in energy and not as sharp as the previous time I saw this performed.

 

So, I’d call that an iffy opening. The song itself could probably work if it was done with some over-the-top exuberance, but they were restrained on it this time.

Moving along, Kawai-kun and Kiriyama-kun introduced the first performers – Hirano Sho, Nagase Ren, and Takahashi Kaito. This is a bit unusual since we’ve normally had one of the other debuted groups out to do the talk at this point even when a junior group was preparing to perform.

Shounen Club 2014.09.03 Review

I have a growing list of Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) pet-peeves, and at the top of that list is the way all the elder juniors – the reasonably popular juniors who are above eighteen years of age – are often lumped together into one big mega-group for performances even though this doesn’t do justice to their talents. And at the start of the first Shounen Club of September, here’s the same sort of thing:

It’s not quite all of them singing “Anniversary” by KinKi Kids, but it’s enough that it’s a jumble – especially since they’re all wearing white. Aside from Jesse, Nozawa Yuki, Sanada Yuma, Masuda Ryo, and Hanzawa Akatsuki, I did notice that we got a sudden influx of SnowMen. The members of that group don’t get much SC attention – not in a featured role like this – so that was a positive.

Pretty soon, A.B.C-Z, Johnny’s West, Nakajima Kento, Kikuchi Fuma, and Sato Shori took the stage, and things got really cluttered, but I like the whole-cast opening in general.

Shounen Club 2014.08.13 Review

The second Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) for August began with the three elder members of Sexy Zone singing “Sexy Summer ni Yuki ga Furu”. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you already know how I feel about this song. If you haven’t: I hate it. I still consider it a mess of randomly assembled musical phrases and sound effects rather than a proper composition. The dance is weak, too (lots of arm-waving, very little leg work).

Thankfully, they didn’t spend much time singing it, as A.B.C-Z quickly took the stage for a verse or two of “Walking on Clouds” Not the best A.B.C-Z song by a long shot, but certainly an improvement on “Sexy Summer” – especially thanks to Hashimoto-kun’s singing.

They’re still missing Totsuka Shota-kun, by the way.

The pattern for this opening is obvious – each of the debuted groups get to do a teensy bit of a song – so I wasn’t surprised to see Johnny’s West take the stage next for “Banzai Yume Mansai!”

It’s not my kind of song and for some reason always reminds me of an AKB song, but they had the most sophisticated choreography of the three groups.

I don’t like opening medleys in general, but at least this one eventually got the audience pumped up.

Hosts Kawai Fumito-kun and Kiriyama Akito-kun talked to the members of Johnny’s West, and Daiki Shigeoka-kun got to introduce the theme of the show: Summer. Let’s see how many summer songs they actually do (I’m not going to count “Sexy Summer” since it can’t decide what season it’s in, has Christmas themes throughout it, and they wore Santa costumes when initially promoting it).

Shounen Club 2014.08.06 Review

Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) is a music variety show hosted by Kawai Fumito of A.B.C-Z and Kiriyama Akito of Johnny’s West that showcases the song-and-dance skills of the Johnny’s Entertainment agency’s most recently debuted groups – A.B.C-Z, Sexy Zone, and Johnny’s West – as well as the agency’s trainees (known as juniors).

The main fascination with the show, at least for me, is to try to figure out which of the juniors will emerge as the next generation of stars. This episode opens with some prime candidates handling the intro, as Jinguji Yuta, Iwahashi Genki, Abe Aran, and Kishi Yuta led a cadre of other juniors in SMAP’s “Bang! Bang! Vacance”.

They made way for the elder juniors, who continued the song. While the four listed above seem to be in a stable grouping (except that they’re missing Miyachika Kaito), the elder juniors have no such luck, and every time I turn around, they’re in a totally different arrangement.

For the final phase of the song, Sato Shori, Nakajima Kento, and Kikuchi Fuma of Sexy Zone as well as the entirety of Johnny’s WEST and A.B.C-Z (except Totsuka Shota) joined the rest on a very crowded stage. Fair enough, though, since I typically like this type of all-in one-song opening for Shounen Club. It feels right to have the whole cast out front to kick things off.

Shounen Club 2014.07.02 Review

Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) is a music variety show hosted Kawai Fumito of A.B.C-Z and Kiriyama Akito of Johnny’s West that showcases the song-and-dance skills of the Johnny’s Entertainment agency’s most recently debuted groups – A.B.C-Z, Sexy Zone, and Johnny’s West – as well as the agency’s trainees (known as juniors).

The show begins with A.B.C-Z performing their debut song “Za ABC ~5stars~”. There are a lot of juniors in the background and many of them even have microphones, but I’m pretty sure A.B.C-Z can do this song without their help. The stage was way too crowded for me at the very start.

Thankfully, they started doing some specific introductions, beginning with Takahashi Kaito-kun, Nakamura Reia-kun, and Takahashi Fuu-kun. Hmm . . . I was sort of hoping they’d skip surrounding Kaito-kun with skateboards and the like, but it looks like they’ve replaced the rollerskates with head-spinning, and Kaito-kun continues to look a bit slow by comparison. Worse, it’s inconvenient to have two Takahashis in the same trio, isn’t it?

Miyachika Kaito, Abe Aran, Haniuda Amu, and Tajima Shogo also got individual intros. This is sort of strange, though. I was thinking that this would be one of those things where they’d go through all the juniors on stage, but instead they stopped at those seven. I mean, they didn’t even do Jinguji, Iwahashi, and Kishi, even though the other two members of the group were named. Do you suppose some of it was cut out?