In the last few hours, I found out that the creator of "Lupin III"（ルパン三世）, Monkey Punch（モンキー・パンチ）, nee Kazuhiko Kato（加藤一彦...not to be mistaken for the singer-songwriter）, had passed away last week on April 11th at the age of 81. His name was trending on Twitter a few hours ago once the announcement came out, and no surprise, with all of the attractive panache and pizzazz that the devil-may-care Lupin and the surrounding colourful characters exuded. Plus, of course, there has been the iconic theme song and a lot of the other stylish tunes that have been associated with the movies.
According to her J-Wiki profile, BOBBY started out as the vocalist of a hard rock band Bobby & Little Maggie（ボビー&リトルマギー）back in 1973. Releasing two singles in 1975, the band also held concerts throughout that year and 1976 until it broke up the following year. After that, BOBBY became the vocalist for Kazuo Takeda & All-Stars（竹田和夫&オールスターズ）. Since 1978, she has also been providing commercial jingles and television theme tunes. Although the source of her quote isn't available in the J-Wiki article, she apparently stated that in the past she had once assumed that all she needed to do was to just shout everything out but since then, she's come to realize that going with nuance or not while trying all sorts of things is also good. Certainly, her approach to "Honoo no Takaramono" was a fairly mellow one.
In any case, I'm very sure that once I get up next morning, I will wake up to a elegy of sorts on NHK News for Monkey Punch.
*敏恵 has a few readings but decided to go with "Toshie".
I had watched Castle of Cagliostro as a kid and was absolutely enamored by opening theme. The wee little thing I was did not understood not a bit of Japanese, back then my dad would randomly pick out 'cartoon' dvds for me and my brother to be entertaied with, even if it was entirely in foreign languages. Many years later I had finally discovered the name of this song, Fire Treasure as it was named, one of the songs that I would always hold dear to the myself who was completely enamored by the ethereal voice and soft melodies.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very classy song, isn't it? Maybe something that comes out of those 1960s caper movies. I can certainly understand that feeling of delight and relief of re-encountering a song that one has been seeking for so many years.
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