The Shounen Club 14 July 2009 review

I decided to try to go back to two Shounen Club reviews a week again. I really want to reach the 2010 episodes by the end of the year.

This episode begins with a quick dance introduction of the main performers of the show, starting with Nakayama Yuma w/B.I.Shadow. Then each member of Hey! Say! JUMP gets an individual introduction as these two groups are basically all they have left with the rest of the main Juniors dancing at a KAT-TUN concert that day.

As with the previous episode there is no theme for this one. Instead we launch into a HSJ hit medley. It is basically just their four singles that they had released thus far, so nothing all too exciting. Though when the do end it with Ultra Music Power they do a rock version of the song so they can have Okamoto Keito play guitar.

This is followed by a You no Otegami Yomitai Desu! segment that features Yuma. The conversation leads to talking about the drama Yuma was starring in at the time, Koishite Akuma, and of course Morimoto Shintaro, who had a supporting role in it, is brought up.

We have YuBIS performing the theme song for that drama, Akuma na Koi, then. It is a slow tempo song so not much in the way of energy for the performance, but it was probably for the best as Kochi Yugo is still rather lost looking on stage.

Hey, there are other Juniors around! This time we get to have Yara Tomoyuki be included in the Otegami segment. The letter talks about dancing of course as that is Yara's expertise.

Since the other members of Butokan are not there Yara performs with the dance unit They Budo. He performs a song called Jonetsu no Ichiya with They Budo backdancing and down back vocals. The dance of course is the highlight of the performance.

There is then the game segment of the program and this time we have a mix of HSJ and Juniors to participate. The game is the one where an item is in a box and the boys have to touch it without looking then guess what it is. This is usually pretty fun as most of the time the boys freak out whenever they manage to touch what is inside. Yuma is especially bad about it as he manages to freak out before even getting his hand in the box. This is also one of those games that you really do not need to know any Japanese to follow along with.

HSJ then perform Endless Dream, a song that ended up being put on their debut album. I am glad it did end up on a CD as it was one of my favorite songs from this era. That and there are just so many of their songs that have never been put on a CD that I wish they would start doing that again for the B-sides to their singles.

We then have the continuation of the ~ ni Q segment from the previous episode, this time focusing on the members of Hey! Say! BEST and what they are most afraid of. It starts off with Arioka Daiki who had put down bugs for his answer. Inoo Kei said he was afraid of sewing machines. Takaki Yuya had his answer be ghosts. I believe Yabu Kota wrote about a bug as long as his foot. Yaotome Hikaru wrote cats but everyone leaves the room as he begins to talk about it. But Koyama Keiichiro does come back to finish off the segment.

The next Otegami segment has most of HSB to read the letter and discuss the topic it brings up. It is nice to see Inoo and Arioka getting some screen time as they are the members of HSB that have not gotten so much so far in these episodes.

Yabu and Hikaru do an acoustic version of STAR TIME with Question? backing them up. I think I would have preferred to have had Question? perform on their own, but at least they got to perform once for the month.

For the end song we get a blast from the past with Koyama getting to lead a song with all the 16+ main performers and it is Nami, which was a Four Tops song. It is a nice slow song that works well as an end song.


While these two episodes were fun I look forward to returning to the norm again with the focus on the Juniors again.

I am reminded about how frustrated I was with the lack of releases from HSJ back then with this episode. Honestly Jounetsu Jump could have easily been a single with Endless Dream as a B-side. The former was a volley ball support song so it would have had a tie-in and since they were doing the theme songs for the Nintama Rantaro anime they could have had those songs on the single as well for added promotion. Instead we got a one-off single release with only two members of the group which left a bit of a sting for the HSJ fans waiting for the group to release something. I do not know what their management was thinking back then but 2009 was one big misstep for the group and they do not seem to have been really able to recover from it.