The Shounen Club 16 February 2003 review

The final February episode that I have and then it is on to the final month of this season of Shounen Club. I am looking forward to reaching that benchmark, after that I will have to focus on debuts, which there should be more of compared to these early episodes that only saw Tackey & Tsubasa debut.

After the introductions there is finally someone different to do the first song, A.B.C.

We only have three of the usual hosts for today's episode as Ikuta Toma and Kazama Shunsuke are busy with other things. And there is no guest either so it is just these three talking and reading postcards. So to say the least I was rather bored.

The first song segment is introduced as a Junior performance but honestly it is just a collaboration between the two Junior groups, KAT-TUN and Ya-Ya-Yah. I think by now it has become apparent that these two groups as well as Four Tops are, if not most popular, the most pushed groups at this time.

For one of the talk segments we get VTR instead of Yamashita Tomohisa visiting a place he had not been to in ten years. It is just Yamapi doing this so if you are a fan of him this is probably great, but if you are apathetic to him like me it gets boring after a while.

And just when I thought I was safe this episode Yax3 have a medley which of course includes Aikotoba wa Ya-Ya-Yah. ( ≧Д≦) Thankfully it is a medley and in the end the three hosts for the episode show up to sing another song which helps keep things short for Yax3.

We get Toma's solo corner where he interviews various groups, with this episode being KAT-TUN. The members pick a "letter" and then do whatever it says.

The highlight would be Tanaka Koki headbutting Akanishi Jin after having to pretend he was a girl and give him a love confession.

Yax3 get to end the episode with Love & Dream. Most interesting thing to note is that the focus of the group for the song is not only on Yabu Kota but Yamashita Shoon and Ayukawa Taiyou, who will be the three members of the current line up to be part of the final line up for the group. I would not be surprised to see the group begin to make their shuffle in the next few episodes now.

This time I actually understood exactly what Yamapi said during his end segment. Of course it helped that it was two short sentences with vocab one learns in their first year of Japanese language courses.

This episode gives some nice variety to the show. It does seem though the reason we got a bit of a change in pace was because of scheduling conflicts mainly.