The Shounen Club 19 March 2006 review

While the first recap episode of this month was more to salvage what they could of the unaired February episodes this recap is all about KAT-TUN and celebrating their debut.

The plus about this recap episode is that the quality of the video is good which means being able to clearly watch at least some clips of earlier episodes.

KAT-TUN not only host this episode but are also the producers of it. The theme of the episode is Kadode (which in this case would be best translated to a departure or setting off), to go along with the group's debut.

They start off with showing the PV for their debut single, Real Face. This is probably my favorite song from the group, but it helps that the music for the song was written by B'z guitarist Tak Matsumoto.

After that they have a "quiz" for the history of the group. The major events are on this board and members have to guess things like dates and song names to fill the blanks on it.

With this we get to see footage from the group's debut on the program Pop Jam back in April of 2001. So everyone looks really young.

There are some other clips of them from the early Shounen Club episodes, and it is nice to see these clearly even though they are all rather short.

There is then the first KAT-TUN ni Q segment of the episode. The first topic they have are the group's weak points. I think Taguchi Junnosuke is spot on with saying that one of their weak points is that members tend to get in the way of seeing those behind them. It has been an issue I have had with trying to get a screen cap of the group that you can see them all clearly with for a while.

The next topic is what I believe is a saying for the group from now on. They end up picking one from Ueda Tatsuya that is Pantsu ni Kedama, which all I get from that is hairballs in underwear. I could be a bit off with my translation there but I would assume it would not be too far off as the guys do seem to pick it because of how random it is.

After more VTR the group have a self request corner where each member shows a request of a performance they want to see.

Kamenashi Kazuya's request is Hoshikuzu no Spangle which they finally list what the original artist of the song for. So happy to know this now but I have the feeling hunting down such an old Shounentai album is going to be really hard. Also to note this is the only request from any of the members that is for a performance with the group.

After this Taguchi Junnosuke gets to read a letter from Yabu Kota of Ya-Ya-Yah. I get him congratulating the group on their debut and then having a message for each member.

After the letter they show clips of most of the Junior groups. I do wonder why a couple of them were selected as the J.J.Express one is of the group before half the current members were added and they show a Kis-My-Ft. performance even though the group has been merged to create Kis-My-Ft2. Though for the Kis-My-Ft. performance it seems to be from one of the episodes I had trouble playing all the way through so there is a silver lining there.

After they do the next KAT-TUN ni Q they announce that the group will be returning to be on the April episodes of the show. No big surprise there as this should be the usual newly debuted group is a regular/frequent guest on the program for a while.

At the end of this program there is a VTR of Kokubun Taichi to promote the start of a new program, Shounen Club Premium. This is a bit of a spin-off program from SC but the focus is on already debuted Johnny's with some of the older Juniors and is more of a talk with a performance thrown in. Either way it is nice to know when the program started as it is knowledge I did not have before.



And with this episode I am going back to twice a week reviews for SC. So the next review will be Wednesday.

Also for those that have been asking about getting their hands on these episodes themselves I have decided to share them over a the Jpop Central forums. You will need an account and you have to post ten times before you can access the Media Central part of the forum that I have put the links up for them. But there are plenty of spam topics, like "what song are you listening to" posts that should let you reach ten posts in no time. This is mainly because once I hit a certain point I know exactly who the original uploader is and I know they have requested that if the files are uploaded elsewhere it is done somewhere that is locked for members only. So far I have only gotten the first few episodes I have up but I hope eventually I will have it all up for people, especially these older episodes that are not so easy to find anymore.