To warm our way to Spring, here's one of the surprise newcoming licenses from yesterday's update to the Apple family's Pop Tap Beat!
「トイ・ストーリー」より
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taiko PTB |
 |
★2 (82) |
★3 (136) |
★4 (234) |
★7 (371) |
- |
97-117
toystr (Toy Story)It appears this mobile/home device Taiko title had more fangs to sharpen on the foreign licenses department than the launch's batch, as it appears Bandai Namco too has a snake on its metaphorical boot. What a drumming debut for Disney's right-arm computer-generated animation company!
Premiering on November 1995 in the United States, Toy Story is the feature film debut from the company nowadays known as Pixar Animation Studios, a once-subsidiary of Lucasfilms known as Graphics Group which ballooned in its own company jig due to generous investments from third parties, among which are the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Disney, which ended up fully acquiring it in 2006.
After Pixar's acclaim from their computer-animated short Tin Toy in 1988, they've been approached by the Mickey Mouse company's higher-ups with an herculean task for them: the production of a fully-computer-animated feature film being told by a small toy's perspective. The approved pitch ultimately resulted in the story of a kid's toys competing for the attention of their young owner Andy, focusing on the veteran cowboy Woody and the newcoming space ranger Buzz Lightyear; with their bickering as the cause of separation from Andy's house, the two now have to make it back before the kid's family start to move out into another house, while getting to better know each other on the side. Both Toy Story's universal acclaim and its status as the first feature film fully made in computer graphics have warranted it a preservation seat at the National Film Registry in 2005, together with a special Academy Award and a few (not won) nominations previously unheard of for an animation movie, including Best Original Screenplay. Hell, if it wasn't for Die Hard With a Vengeance, it would have also been 1995's highest-grossing film, sitting on over 360 million Dollars!
You've Got A Friend In Me is the 1995 movie's main theme, coming back for the series' sequels in additional form of covers and as a leitmotif for other instrumental tracks in each of the movies' scores. It was composed and performed by Randall Stuart 'Randy' Newman and it got nominated as its debut year's Best Original Song for both Academy and Golden Globe awards, both seats being taken away by another Disney song on its stead: Pocahontas's Colors of the Wind. A certified Platinum seller in both the USA and the United Kingdom, it also received covers in different languages for the extra-continental movie releases over the years, including a Spanish cover by the Gipsy Kings and a Japanese one by Diamond✡︎Yukai (イアモンド✡︎ユカイ). Think again if you're fast of claiming first music-game blood for Taiko on this song: it actually appeared twice in general rhythm gaming talk before, once for Ubisoft's Just Dance 2021 and another time with Kingdom Hearts: Memory of Melody, as the instrumental version that was formerly featured in Kingdom Hearts III.
The fill-1/12-charting family meets another unlikely member in this freshly-minted licensed pick, going after the background instrumental backing rather than the English cover's vocal lead. It's also one of the few Anbime songs with over 30 slight BPM shifts during its play, the most evident of which being for the very last notes going a bit slower... watch out for these, accuracy snipers!
