Osaki ni shitsurei – Onyanko Club
Another movie song. Yes, the Onyanko Club had their own movie. As if they wouldn’t. You have the music, you have the TV show, you have the clothing line, the photobooks, the every piece of merchandise that anyone has ever found a way to print on – of course there’s going to be a movie. This song was written for and released with it.
But it is an odd thing. A key, assumed ingredient to it, one would think, would be for the members of the Onyanko Club to have starring roles. They are in it, but none of them have speaking parts and their inclusion is near entirely made up of documentary footage of rehearsals, radio and TV interviews, seaside frolicking and the second graduation concert at Yokohama Stadium. Instead, we get for a plot a marathon runner, a bootlegging ring, an assassination attempt, all bunch of nonsense that exists completely discrete to the girls.
It doesn’t make sense. Instead of their A Hard Day’s Night we were given a Can’t Buy Me Love, except one made not with nostalgia but contemporaneously and with complete input from Onyanko Corp. Were people happy with that? I wasn’t. It’s not like they couldn’t act or didn’t harbour desires to act. They were in all manner of dramas and commercials and always did fine jobs. Maybe it was an image thing – that they here would be playing themselves and not characters, and that had to be controlled. But they were nothing but their goofy selves every week on Yuyake Nyan Nyan! I don’t know. Most likely another, completely unrelated project had the Onyanko brand tacked on to it so it would sell. You can probably go on living very happily with yourself never making the effort to see it.
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