The Shounen Club 10 April 2005 review

Onto the second episode of the new season that should help show what changes are here to stay and which are not.

This episode goes back to the usual opening introductions for groups. We get confirmation that J.J.Express is a five member group with their introduction.

This episode has Tanaka Koki as the producer with the theme of the episode being "style".

J.J.Express are asked about their style and we manage to see a smile for Arioka Daiki. Now this looks more like the Daiki I am familiar with and it is nice to see him not look so stiff on stage.

While the theme is supposed to be style the music all lends itself to the style that Koki is known for, hip hop, or as hip hop as Johnny's can get. Which means almost all songs in the opening medley have a rap to them, which lets Koki stay onstage for most of the medley. Thankfully a couple of other groups get to be a part of the medley but it is mainly Koki and KAT-TUN for it.

After the medley we have Kamenashi Kazuya and Akanishi Jin on stage talking about the theme to fill time before the next performance, which they introduce.

Ya-Ya-Yah perform the song Never Stop Music with JJE as back up singers for the chorus. It is a fun song that uses the younger Juniors energy well with the dance as there is a dance break in the middle of the song. It also is a nicely balanced song with all four members of Yax3 all getting turns to be center stage at one point or another.

It looks like Junior Hai~ School has carried over from the past season. I am kinda glad it did as these segments are usually enjoyable. This one had the contestants pick one of four answers to a scenario. Each answer would then correlate to a certain type of guy they where and then which type of girl they would be bested suited for. We also get Jin showing off his English skills here.

We get Taguchi Junnosuke's usual skit. If you like puns then it works but I guess for those who are not very familiar with Japanese it is a bit hard to follow.

We get a medley of sorts with Toshin Yoshikazu & A.B.C. doing the first song of it. Rather sad they did not get to show off their acrobatics with this as that usually always makes their performances worth watching.

Kis-My-Ft. also get to sing a song in the medley and they even break out the roller skates for it. Though in the end the most stand out thing about it is that Kitayama Hiromitsu is a part of the group that did a jacket change in the middle of the song but could only get the jacket half on and has to complete the performance with it just hanging off the one arm.

Since NEWS has for whatever reason disappeared for this second episode we get a VTR  of them instead. They go over style points for each member, a couple of the more memorable are Kato Shigeaki with his very shiny silver shoes and Masuda Takahisa with a belt that has the name "Johnny" on it.

This episode gives us another Naka Naka Ii Jyan segment with Koki, Nakajima Yuto and Nakamaru Yuichi. It is Nakamaru's turn to feel left out as the other two have custom hoodies and all he gets is a T-shirt.

This leads in to Koki doing his solo song Real 7 that eventually leads into KAT-TUN taking the stage to sing a group song.

We get a KAT-TUN break with Jimmy Mackey talking to Yax3 about their style. It is pretty clear that most of them are still too young to really have much of one of their own but even so are around the age that they are at least noticing things like that.

Question? getting to perform their song, Holy Heaven and we learn that Ishigaki Daisuke has now been added to the group which now gives them a keyboardist.

Koki gets to talk about the theme and I guess this is going to be a thing that the episode producers will do. Koki ends up talking for a long time though and you get a sense he is more trying to fill time than say anything all that meaningful.

KAT-TUN then takes the stage for yet another song. Because I guess there were not enough KAT-TUN performances in this episode. Or maybe they were trying to fix the balance that the last episode had. And yes I am going to be bitter and ragey about this now because I have reached my limit when it comes to this again.

And of course KAT-TUN is the only group to sing the end theme, yet again. Honestly this would not be such an issue for me if there was another song in between the two last songs or if they at least had some of the other Juniors join KAT-TUN for the end song. But there is not and I fail to see the point of anyone tuning in for the final ten minutes or so of this show if they are not KAT-TUN fans. Sure they are trying to work in the other Junior groups by giving them a brief dance segment in the song but I fail to see why they just cannot have them sing the song with KAT-TUN instead. I mean even when the program was Four Tops focused other Junior groups got to sing the end song so I do not see any reason that needed to change.

I have never hated the group before but right now I am just sick of them.


I keep clinging to the hope that it will not be much longer until SC is more general Junior focused instead of it being so focused on KAT-TUN. And yet every episode like this just ends up disappointing me. Especially since the episode before had a nice balance in comparison.