Yoru no Hit Studio （夜のヒットスタジオ）

"Yoru no Hit Studio"(Hit Studio of the Night) was a music show that I didn't actively seek as I did with "The Top 10" or "The Best 10" on the old rental VHS tapes. It actually sought me out in a way. Excerpts of the show would pop up as the filler at the end of the tape after the main show before the video finally hit the end and went into automatic rewind mode. But it got to the point that I got interested enough in the program that I finally did start searching for tapes that actually featured the venerable Fuji-TV show.

Launching in November 1968 on Mondays at 10 p.m., about a good decade before those aforementioned music ranking shows came onto the airwaves, "Yoru no Hit Studio" was more of a music-variety program in its first several years. There were other segments such as giving out cash prizes over the phone and even a mini-drama called "Kayo Drama" which featured the songs of the guests who appeared that particular week. For those years, the hosts were Takehiko Maeda（前田武彦） and Mari Yoshimura（芳村真理）. Yoshimura would have the longest tenure of the various hosts at almost 20 years (1968-1988), except for a period of 6 months between 1973 and 1974 in which she and Maeda were exiled due to Maeda making a live political show of support for a Communist Party candidate, something that didn't sit well with the powers-that-be at Fuji. Maeda never returned.

My acquaintance with "Yoru no Hit Studio" began after the show had shifted format to become a straight music performance program. So, the people I was accustomed to seeing head up the show was Yoshimura and former member of the Group Sounds band, The Spiders, Jun Inoue（井上順）, who came aboard from 1976 to 1985. In fact, the video above is of a 1978 episode. One of the things I've enjoyed watching these old episodes on YouTube is just how the fashions and hairstyles changed.

However, the Fuji-TV set barely, if at all, changed. In the J-Wiki article on the show, there was a comparison made between "Yoru no Hit Studio" and its glossier cousin "The Best 10" on TBS in which whereas "The Best 10" was famous for its often imaginative sets and the orchestra, "Yoru no Hit Studio" was more known for the camerawork and the performances. If I can also add to the comparison, "The Best 10" had quite the glamour thanks to those expensive sets, its outdoor location shots and the over-the-top, non-stop hosts in Hiroshi Kume and Tetsuko Kuroyanagi（久米宏・黒柳徹子）. On the other hand, "Yoru no Hit Studio" had more of that down-home town square feel with the audience, the singers were placed on benches compared to the plush lounge sofas on that other program, and often, family or fan club members of the singers would pop up just before they sang. And the hosts seemed more folksier than Kume or Kuroyanagi.

Perhaps the show's most famous gimmick was the opening medley. The "top batter", as the hosts pegged the first singer, sang the next singer's hit before handing off the mike with a quickly delivered intro to that singer and then the chain would continue until the final singer finished with his/her own hit. It was nice seeing a bit of that celeb karaoke each week.

During its 22 years on the air, "Yoru no Hit Studio" showcased 13,000 songs sung by 1,000 performers.  Akina Nakamori（中森明菜） had her barnburner with "Desire".

And loads more...

And as the years passed into the late 1980s, rock acts like BOOWY also made their presence felt. Although the title started gaining epic words like "Deluxe" and "Super" during that time, after 1131 episodes, "Yoru no Hit Studio", like the two music ranking shows, decided to call it a run at the end of the decade. So, almost 22 years after its birth, the program ended on October 3, 1990 as one of the last showcases of kayo kyoku as it was going into the transition into J-Pop, the music that's now being highlighted by its seeming heir, "Music Station" of TV Asahi.