Hiroyuki Okita -- Moete Hero（燃えてヒーロー）

I don't follow soccer except for the World Cup competition. Perhaps it's just the spectacle of it all; being a sports event that is even bigger than the Olympics will do that to you, I guess. Toronto is a multicultural city so the World Cup gets folks here even more excited. The various restaurants and bars in the various hubs in town such as Koreatown and Little Portugal have had customers extremely lit for the past couple of weeks, and I remember walking through the central business district via the PATH system (the world's largest underground shopping complex...yeah, even bigger than the ant nest under Tokyo Station) four years ago during that tournament and seeing a whole mix of corporate suits and casually-dressed people in one marble food court yelling and screaming at the myriad TV screens. It was nice to see them as much as it was to see the actual action.

So I figure that it was about time to pay tribute to this year's World Cup in Russia through one of the most popular cultural touchstones for soccer in Japan. Even I have heard of "Captain Tsubasa"（キャプテン翼）, and some of my students were ardent followers of the original manga and subsequent anime. I think my current English student probably read the manga when he was a kid since he played the beautiful game in junior high school (would like to hear his thoughts about the tournament this weekend).

Anyways, I found out that there have been a number of incarnations for "Captain Tsubasa" on the small screen with their own theme songs. Why not put up the very first opening theme then? "Moete Hero" (Get All Fired Up, Hero) was actually the B-side to Hiroyuki Okita's（沖田浩之）November 1983 single "Fuyu no Lion"（冬のライオン...Winter Lion） which was the ending theme for the first season of "Captain Tsubasa".

Ahhh...the nostalgia of that rumbling electric guitar and tight horn section. Yes, a lot of anison had that sort of arrangement back in the 1980s, didn't they? Not sure if any of the current members of the Japanese team had gotten fired up by this theme....but then again, most of them were probably not even born then.

Osamu Yoshioka（吉岡治）took care of the lyrics while Hiroshi Uchiki（内木弘）came up with the rumbling music. I read that "Captain Tsubasa" did have its fans overseas as well so I wonder if there are soccer fans all over the world who remember "Moete Hero".