The Shounen Club 22 September 2002 review

And we start a short stretch of consecutive Shounen Club episodes for 2002. It is nice to see changes occurring from episode to episode instead after long periods of time, and thankfully this will be more like the pace that most of the rest of the reviews will be set at.

While having Akanishi Jin doing the intro with Jimmy Mackey is a sign of the growing popularity of KAT-TUN in general I think it also marks the beginning of a change that will slowly occur over the next couple of years or so as the program changes hosts. But more on that with later episodes.

This episode does confirm that J-Support has had their name changed to the unfortunate K.K.Kity. The name comes from the first letter of the last names of the members, but as an American seeing three Ks together just does not look right at all.

While there really is nothing of much interest to point out with Ya-Ya-Yah in general I am just taken aback that their intro dance song is Tubthumping. If you want to know why I suggest you google the lyrics to the song.

KAT-TUN gets to perform a song and are continuing to look and sound like the KAT-TUN people knew when they debuted. Case and point, they play up the sexy image quite a bit with this performance, which is rather amazing with the outfits they are stuck wearing for it.

First up there is VTR to promote one of Arashi's group movies, Life is Hard dakedo Happy, that is set to come out about a month after this episode.

One thing I like about these early SC episodes is that you get an idea of what is going on with Johnny's groups in general instead of it being so focused on Juniors.

The guest this week is Takizawa Hideaki. He talks about debuting in the first studio segment for the show.

Since we had the debut announcement last week but do not have Tackey & Tsubasa on the show this week I think it falls in line with the speculation that the episodes were done a couple of weeks in advance. As it seems like Tackey's appearance here was something scheduled before hand but he talks about the debut announcement so I expect that while it had been announced they did not have enough time to change the show much, as they had to promote the Arashi movie and the drama, and/or get Imai Tsubasa on as well with short notice. 

Tackey gets to perform a solo song, Ki Se Ki, which I believe is off the debut album for Tackey & Tsubasa.

Gratuitous Koyashige screen cap is gratuitous. And I think that is one of the worst dye jobs Koyama Keiichiro has ever had.

Most of the VTR focuses on how Ikuta Toma fails as the Assistant Director for the drama. Such as getting in the middle of a scene during filming.

Or not be able to tell what scene they are supposed to be shooting and needing to search on who is supposed to do what.

Tackey even eventually assigns him a helper with Yokoo Wataru. Though that does not seem to fix his overall fail as an AD. Though you can tell he is trying hard to do well, he is just well over his head, and clumsy.

Kamenishi shippers start!

Kamenashi Kazuya and Akanishi Jin are not much better as they mess up their "fight" scene by laughing through it.

They go back to the studio and talk about the drama recording some more basically before moving onto the final performance of the show.

It is a bit weird to watch this Four Tops performance as Yamashita Tomohisa wearing a different outfit than the other three who are in matching outfits. At this time I feel like I cannot really guess if this was to make Yamapi stand out from the rest or they may have not had a fourth matching outfit for him.

On another note it is interesting to see how quickly Yax3 look to be growing up. About half the group are almost as tall as the Four Tops members, though Yabu Kota remains tiny in comparison.

Yamapi mutters on about something, I think it might be about youth but honestly I was too distracted with that thing he was using to whack his own leg with to pay that much attention.


Even though I enjoyed the rehearsal footage episodes I feel a bit glad for the show to return to the more standard format of the earlier episodes. Though I can only assume that when Tackey & Tsubasa are guests on the show it will be another odd episode with almost all the focus being on them as the new debuted group of the time. I will also assume that will be next episode, so I look forward to that on Saturday.