Blog - E-Pak-Sa's Around the World in 80 Days with Pon-chak
E-Pak-Sa's Around the World in 80 Days with Pon-chak
Despite its title, "E-Pak-Sa's Around the World in 80 Days with Pon-chak" (Japanese title 「李博士の八十日間世界一周ポンチャック」), this DVD re-release of the 1996 video shows Korean pon-chak singer E-Pak-Sa performing in 9 cities around the world in only two weeks. He travels to a new city almost every day, from Tokyo to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Cairo, Rome, London, New York, Hawaii, and back to Tokyo. During the whole trip, Pak Sa eats at Korean restaurants everyday, most of the time his favorite dish, doenjang-jjigae.
The strict schedule trip doesn't go without some trouble, and contains a bunch of misadventures. First, his keyboardist Kim Su Il suddenly drops out half-way when he gets a call from Korea asking him to come back home, leaving Pak-Sa to perform alone with his boombox. Also, staff manages to forget in the Bangkok hotel's fridge the dozen of kimchee sets his wife had tenderly prepared. As days pass he misses his wife more and more, and when he can't bear it anymore and decides to call home, he is hung up to because it's in the middle of the night there. In New York he will find a new support keyboardist for his gig, but then realize that his long time friend Su Il is unreplaceable.
You couldn't expect his performances to have large audiences, and indeed he mostly performs on the street in typical sightseeing spots. While some people do stop to watch, the most he gets from passer-bys is often some laughs or "who the hell is that guy?" type of looks. He'll only find an enthusiastic audience in a Korean-Japanese restaurant in New York, and later at a final party on a yakatabune in Tokyo.
The tour's climax is probably his show in front of the three pyramids in Egypt, according to the box it was the first "concert" ever held there. While the Cairo sequence passes quickly with no live part, that show comes up at the very end of the film, closing it perfectly.
The DVD contains a cool extra in addition to the film, a Japanese TV commercial for an anti-cockroach product, featuring Pak Sa! Truly hilarious stuff!
Anyway, I of course recommend this great video to all E-Pak-Sa fans! According to Amazon Japan, they have one copy left in stock at this time. (The DVD has Korean and Japanese dialogue with Japanese subtitles.)
Posted on February 11, 2006 at 19:22 | Tweet
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YMCA version coréenne (E-Pak-Sa)
Voir la vidéo sur Dailymotion. Repérée chez Natacha QS, une version du tube disco par un coréen allumé. Le gars qui chante faux s'appelle E-Pak-Sa et c'est déjà une légende sur le net. Il...
May 19, 2006 at 09:30