Today's choice comes from one of our readers, Yusri Khairi. It's Variety time!
Usavich Medley (ウサビッチ・メドレー) ~Taiko no Jikan~ (～太鼓の時間～)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (105) | x4 (176) | x5 (317) | x7 (471) |
Taiko Wii 4
71~179
none
usaviAfter Taiko PS2 Yondaime's rare variety songs and Taiko Wii 1's Oretachi CoroCoro Age, here's another unusual Variety song you probably won't see in another Taiko game outside its console game debut. As the title suggests, today's song is a medley based on the series of animated short films Usavich (ウサビッチ), released in 2006 by Satoshi Tomioka (富岡聡) and his studio Kanaban Graphics.
In the title, the Japanese word for 'rabbit' - usagi - is paired with the 'vich' suffix to make it sound like a Russian name; quite appropriately, Usavich is about the misadventures of a couple of rabbits, Kireneko and Putin, who are trapped in a Soviet prison. The short films' setting is mainly musical, without any intellegible speech, and the characters express their emotions with only groans and facial expressions, like many older cartoon shows (eg Tom and Jerry). Usavich was originally created for MTV Japan's mobile service 'Flux', and it's still going on after four seasons. On August last year, Bandai Namco released a licensed Nintendo DS game for the show, Usavich - Game no Jikan (USAVICH ゲームの時間).
Daisuke Ueno (上野大典), Usavich's music composer, is also behind the show's medley available on the final Wii Taiko, which is inspired both from the videogame and the original show. The names of the episodes of Season 1 were always labeled with "*** no Jikan" (Time for ***), and this feature is also reflected in the medley's subtitle, "Taiko no Jikan" (=Time for Taiko).
This medley's Oni offers a solid middle tier notechart with effective 1/12 and 1/16 beat patterns, long drumrolls and plenty of different music and sound samples from the show, even the grunts of the rabbit characters themselves. The medley ends with a short extract of the chorale Jesus bleibet meine Freude from Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147, which is incidentally the ending music for each Usavich episode as well.
