THE Masayuki Paradise

 While it's a shame Masayuki Yamamoto's songs outside anime music doesn't get much attention (same thing with other anison singers or seiyuus with their own music careers), going into his own career doesn't stop him from being recognized as the guy who makes anime BGM. In this article, I'm going to dig in Time Bokan references and related songs during his singer-songwriter days. First and foremost, we stumble into one of his themed songs: the  Nantokaman Series . These are series of songs set to Time Bokan-esque music dealing with the events that happened recently at that time, mostly based on Yamamoto's experience. For example, Fukkyuu Okaeriman no Uta deals with the January 1995 earthquake, infamously known as the The Great Hanshin Earthquake; it was the reason a planned concert based on his then upcoming album was cancelled. Another has Zensen Tabidachi! Otazuneman no Uta as its theme song to the Masayuki Zensen biannual tour. A couple of those songs are no...

 Last year was the 60th anniversary of Tatsunoko Production, considered to be the Hanna-Barbera   of Japan . The celebrations were not yet over with a special Tatsunoko 60th Legends  concert held at Zepp DiverCity Tokyo last January 9. All the living featured performers (as Ichiro Mizuki passed away) had their anison debut on a Tatsunoko show, and it's really interesting for a popular anison singer who's that famous. While we foreigners never saw the live, I browsed all the live reactions from people across Twitter on the day of performance. Here's the full summary of the entire concert covered so far. The opening number was Isao Sasaki's anison debut, Shinzo Ningen Casshan , singing both the opening and ending themes. Before Casshan, Sasaki lend his voice to Joe the Condor in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman  using his real kanji name. In between these songs, Sasaki congratulated the studio on his, quote on quote, 70th  anniversary; he meant to say 60th, but even a...

 Here is the third part of Masayuki Yamamoto's biography. The section where he got a career that stuck him for 35 years (as of this writing). Yamamoto's anime music work went well until the time Itadakiman  was about to air. As mentioned in the previous part of the biography , the show went through changes with one of them being some musician scheduling conflict or something similar. Yamamoto was also given no character choice for him to voice. He was very disappointed with so little task to make music on that he eventually left production. Itadakiman also went through a timeslot change and failed to impress the audience -- both from the concept and the late evening schedule -- that Tatsunoko cut the episodes from the planned 26 to just 20, and ceased the Time Bokan franchise for a while. Meanwhile in MIC, after Galactic Whirlwind   Sasuraiger concluded, their shows didn't perform well through both quality and its toy sponsors. Chou Kosoku Galvion  suffered the simi...