Hiroshi Miyagawa -- Theme for "Zoom In!! Asa!"（ズームイン!!朝!）

As a pre-pubescent kid, I once had a thing for morning TV shows. Yeah, it's a weird flex but just humour me for a paragraph. Maybe it was because they were new visual "toys" considering that I couldn't wake up early enough usually, but I remember insisting to Mom to wake me up when this newfangled ABC program titled "Good Morning America" started up in 1975 since it had that catchy theme, a great set that I would love to live in, and the novelty of a veteran American TV actor, David Hartman, as the host. She reluctantly acceded and that was that. I got to see Hartman, actress Nancy Dussault and very newscaster-ly Steve Bell.

Well, in Japan, there was similar programming with jovial and comforting hosts and appealing sets. As a teacher there, one of the first shows that I got to know well was NTV's "Zoom In!! Asa!" (Zoom In!! Morning!). It would start with Norio Fukutome（福留功男）, who was the 2nd host in the history of the show from 1988 to 1998, greeting folks from outside the NTV broadcasting centre in Tokyo with his co-host before the theme song came on and the scenes shifted to various locations around the nation with reporters there giving their weather impressions, and then it was back to Fukutome for the morning news.

As for that theme song, it was a nice and pleasant sonic glass of orange juice, and now hearing it again on its own for the first time, not only Vitamin C but Vitamin Nostalgia flooded my veins. Master composer Hiroshi Miyagawa（宮川泰）who has been responsible for his fair share of kayo, anison and TV theme songs was also the one behind the "Zoom In!!" theme. It's sunny and bright and it sounds like Miyagawa must have been watching segments of 1960s American variety shows or game shows for his inspiration. As soon as I hear the song, I get announcers talking about whatever is in the Spiegel catalog in my head. In any case, the theme song was there since the beginning of "Zoom In!!" in 1979, but it looks like Miyagawa's theme got a groovier update somewhere along the line as you can hear below.

One segment of the show that I remember just as much as the opening was Mr. Wicky's One-Point English Conversation in which educator Anton Wicky Ampalavanar used his few minutes to ask folks basic questions in English. I never saw the incident myself but one time, Mr. Wicky was on a variety interview show in which he said that during one broadcast of his segment, one bratty kid came around and gave him the dreaded kanchou, putting his index fingers together and straight and then giving a mighty poke in the area of Mr. Wicky's old rectum, a dastardly trick by children. Apparently the segment ended rather abruptly.

Speaking of NTV in Tokyo, that rather reminds me of the fact that whichever school I worked at during my 17 years in the area, that school was near a famous site. For NOVA, I was just around the corner from Kaminarimon in Asakusa, my final school was within walking distance of Horikoshi High School, an establishment that had a lot of teenage stars as students, and for my second school in the late 1990s to early 2000s, I was not too far away from NTV's old studios in Ichigaya. That opening scene in the top video for "Zoom In!!" was quite familiar to me.