Sakiko Ito -- Himawari Musume （ひまわり娘）

On Saturday, I had just come home from watching "Spiderman: Homecoming" (good but not perfect) and having ramen at the suburban Sansotei (very good), so I mostly missed out on the annual "Omoide no Melody"（思い出のメロディー...Melodies of Memories）on NHK. However, I did catch the last several minutes of it which was better than nothing.

In fact, I had just set my bag down in my room when I returned to the living room and saw former 70s aidoru Sakiko Ito（伊藤咲子）performing a song whose melody fired off some memory engrams. It was her debut single "Himawari Musume" (Sunflower Girl) from April 1974. I knew I must have heard those familiar notes somewhere and sometime.

Yu Aku（阿久悠）really put on the gushy honey-dripping lyrics for "Himawari Girl" as Ito sings out a girl's confession of her being the titular flower while the boy of her dreams is the sun. Awww. Plus, Shuki Levy's（シュキ・レヴィ）down-home melody gets the old nostalgia going in listeners. The song peaked at No. 20 on Oricon. Ito's debut album from July 1974 also had the same title.

I found quite an interesting story about the composer Levy. During the 1970s, he and his partner Aviva Paz became a popular singing duo, Shuki & Aviva, in Europe but what wasn't written on the Wikipedia entry but written on the J-Wiki article was that they also had a measure of success in Japan with a few songs.

But then in the 1980s and 1990s, Levy also became a famous soundtrack composer for a lot of American cartoons including "Spiderman" and "Inspector Gadget". And that included the famous theme song for the latter series. Go, go, gadget pop culture connections!