Wanna see what put me off the rails for the second week in a row?
Daizerokan Taiko Team cover ver. / THE FIRST SLAM DUNK
第ゼロ感／Taiko Team cover ver. /「THE FIRST SLAM DUNK」より
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★3 (85) |
★5 (163) |
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dai0kn (Dai-zero-kan)You know it and so do I: nabbing the rights for licensed tracks from both popular artists/acts and the TV shows/movie scene is pricey, even for one multimedia company like Bandai Namco shouldering a sizeable number of the latter camp under their mantle. This is why many a song have been made playable in music gaming as custom-made cover versions instead of their 'original selves', but in Taiko this is the very first time a cover version is beind declared as such with a direct 'Taiko Team cover ver.' line in the subtitle! This made me curious enough to gaze at the source and find out what interesting backstory the people behind the franchise have found for nabbing a really hot recent release while also not going the full way of securing an original's rights... perhaps for the latter the more plausible explanation might be "it's easier to keep a song in a subcription service if we make a cover for it" but it doesn't matter- I've done my homework on the subject matter the same!
Daizerokan (lit. 'Zero Feeling') is the aggressive end note to one of the Anime movies releasing on 2022's tail end (The First Slam Dunk), starring Takuma 'TAKUMA Mitamura (三田村 卓真) from Kyoto's 10-FEET rock band in his second appearance in the series after his Log Horizon-shaped one, albeit on cover grounds for this latest outing. The plot of the movie follows the preparation of five high school basketball players from Shohoku in preparation for a challenge against the inter-high champions of the sport from the Sannoh School, from the point of view of the point guard Ryota Miyagi. Coming from one of Japan's best-selling manga series overall (7th as of now, with over 170 million copies sold worldwide) and starring the original story's cast, one might assume its prosperous beginning were what lead into this Taiko inclusion; however, I'd argue that hearing of this modern success story without a few notes about the movie's creation is only telling half of the story...
The initial pitch for a Slam Dunk movie was leveled in 2003, when Toei Animation producer Toshiyuki Matsui advanced to mangaka Takehiko Inoue (井上雄彦) the proposal of making a Slam Dunk movie, stronmg of its DVD boxset sales at the time. While Inoue declined the idea, in 2009 he would ask the producer its input about the project, for which it was assembled a team to make up several Slam Dunk animation prototypes over the hefty span of nearly six (6) years, with some of those's budget going over the average expenses for a movie! The passion shown by the Toei producer's prototype-making crew is what led him to be more involved about the project over time, now sitting on the director's chair and with the whole script of his own making. Inoue's angle for the flick was to give it a different angle from the original manga/Anime run, branching from the "buddying talent/untapped potential" tropes to living and overcoming one's personal pain, to which the 'The First' part of the title was chosen: a fresh take on a known story for veterans and an ideal starting point for newcomers to dive into the series. With the box office numbers worldwide not being fully defined just yet (in Italy, my country, screenings for it are still held as of today!), The First Slam Dunk already managed to become the 5th highest-grossing Japanese film worldwide, sitting in between another couple of 2022 success stories from the Rising Sun's silverscreen (Suzume and One Piece Movie Red).
The inclusion of Daizerokan might have been a swift one for the 10-FEET unit, but certaintly not the first one; as revealed in a Billboard interview for the band's latest tour (link), about 10 songs were presented as potential theme song candidates, but both mangaka Inoue and the music director declined every single one of those. One day, however, 10-FEET was asked to make an aggressive insert song for Shohoku School's small forward Kaede Rukawa, to which they answered by presenting one 'Rukawa Odanshi'. Both Inoue and the music director went "That's it." and after a few changes and a new name, Daizerokan was born!
The rugged ambiance from Database can truly be felt on Daizerokan as well, even in cover form! Credit is also to the Oni notechart for it which goes to similar lengths on both backbeat/standard charting and a few musical cues in line with the song itself.
