Blog - saku saku

saku saku

Last week at work, a colleague hinted me that I should check out saku saku, a weekday TV show that started in 2003. The show is pretty strange, at first sight it looks like a show for kids and it's aired at 7:30am, but the characters' attitude is questionable, to say the least.

First, the most talkative character is Zigorow (right), he makes for most of the show. He speaks using the personal pronoun 俺 (ore, slightly rude). On every show, some costumed guy comes briefly and brings Zigorow's laptop computer on which he reads the anonymous letters from fans. Most of the show actually consists of watcher-submitted content: anecdote letters, discussion topics, purikura, drawings, etc.

Then there's the human MC, Kimura Kaela (blog), who also debuted last year as a rock-ish singer (bits I heard reminded me of Juliana Hatfield) and had a first album released recently. Before then she was model for magazine Seventeen.
You would probably expect her to do most of the talking on the show, but that's Zigorow's job. Most of the time she just listens while looking in the void, commenting once in a while. Nevertheless she's often funny and seems to enjoy hanging out with Zigorow.
By the way, the show seems to be taped a whole week at once, and of what I've seen so far it seems to me that Kaela looks a bit more enthusiast on Monday and quite bored on Friday. The other characters are hyper the whole time.

I think Goigoi (gray guy on the left) may be my favorite, he shows up about only once per show, and he often does outdoor reports. Last week he was experimenting doing a part-time job of giving away 500 tissue packs in front of a keitai shop, and what worked best was to put the pack in his mouth and follow the customers as they were entering the shop.
Even though Zigorow and Goigoi have a mouth that seems able to open/close, it doesn't. Instead the characters keep moving to show that they're talking.

Although there aren't other regular characters to the show, there are several people laughing and speaking from outside the set. Sometimes it feels like they're actually about 10.

All of that makes it a pretty weird show. Plus, most music used on the show is taken from old Famicom games such as Super Mario, Gradius, Wrecking Crew, Spelunker, Excite Bike, Space Invader, etc.
One thing that's not so cool though is that it's sort of a mainstream music show too, and everyday it presents bits of music videos for the latest mainstream J-pop hits, something I could do without. At least that's not the show's focus.

saku saku airs Monday to Friday on TVK (Yokohama) at 7:30am and replays at midnight.
Links: Official site, Fan site, Fan blog "saku sakur tsūshin".

(Animated GIF taken from saku sakur tsūshin.)

Posted on February 2, 2005 at 12:36 | Tweet |

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