Petits Rabbit's -- Daydream Café/Chimame-tai -- Poppin' Jump （ぽっぴんジャンプ）

According to the good folks at Wikipedia, an earworm is "...a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing...The word earworm is a calque from the German Ohrwurm...first used in the 1980s".

I myself also like to envision the earworm as the Ceti Eel used to torture and subdue Commander Chekov and poor Captain Terrell in the original version of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" all the way back in 1982. One wonders whether a German Trekkie was inspired by that movie to come up with the name for a song that just...blast it all...won't leave your mind.

For this year, I've got a couple of those aural larvae hanging out in my brain, and they just happen to come from the same anime. My buddy unleashed "Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka?"（ご注文はうさぎですか？...Is The Order A Rabbit?）on me earlier this year, complete with the opening and ending themes. As for the show itself, it was adapted from a manga, and it's basically a pleasant half hour of watching 5 cute girls going through life while working at 3 different cafés in a small European-type town. Mind you, among those kids are a girl with a sister complex, a future NRA member and a moe version of Mr. Spock (yes, another "Star Trek" reference). Bringing in the foodie analogy, when I view "Space Cruiser Yamato" as some serious kaiseki ryori and "Space Dandy" as delectable junk food, "Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka?" is basically a nice cup of coffee with a small slice of strawberry shortcake. And I do appreciate my cup of joe and shortcake.

"Daydream Café" is the opening theme, and just like the show itself, it is an adorable and breezy ditty featuring all of the 5 main seiyuu put together as the group Petits Rabbit's (as a former English teacher, that apostrophe in there annoys me to no end). Written by Aki Hata（畑亜貴）and composed by Kaoru Okubo（大久保薫）, it is as sugary as a Xmas candy cane but without the added calories and can almost get me to skip on the street whenever I hear it...over and over again. I was surprised to find out that Petits Rabbit's Ayane Sakura（佐倉綾音）, Inori Minase（水瀬いのり）, Risa Taneda（種田梨沙）, Satomi Sato（佐藤聡美）and Maaya Uchida（内田真礼）even pull off a nice little song-and-dance in the official music video as above.

Ceti Eel II is the ending theme, "Poppin' Jump" by Chimame Tai（ チマメ隊）. Inori Minase is joined by Sora Tokui and Rie Murakawa（徳井青空・村川梨衣）who voice two of the minor characters, and the name chimame is an acronym of the three characters of Chino, Maya and Megu who are classmates. If anything, "Poppin' Jump" is even cuter than the opening theme and if taken in large doses, could induce uncontrollable hopping just like the titular animal in the show's title. As it is, though, it has just gotten me to sway my head. Still, it is what it's doing inside my head that's been the problem. I can blame the creators of the song, Uran（うらん）and Yuuki Kimura（木村有希）for making me feel like a 5-year-old at Xmas time.

"Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka?" will most likely not enter the annals of significant anime in the 2010s (note from 2019 me: Oh, really?) but neither will it send me to bed racking my brain about what the meaning of life is or trying to purge existential horrors. And you know what? The songs there are probably what I would like to hear in my brain when I enter and exit a particularly welcoming small café...not a Starbucks or even a Timmies.

Tiramisu and coffee at Cova
in Shinjuku Times Square