Rica Matsumoto/Shoko Nakagawa -- Type: Wild（タイプ:ワイルド）

 

Ahh, it is rather nostalgic. I used to remember not only the whole "Pokemon: GO" craze but the Pokemon（ポケモン）card mania from the late 1990s. When my mother actually asked me to get some of those cards for her employer's grandkids when I came home biannually for Xmas, I knew that this was a fad of monumental proportions; I figured that somewhere cats and dogs were living together (that's a "Ghostbusters" reference, by the way). Never got into "Pokemon" myself, though.

So, why talk about it? Well, I had this particular video in the backlog and it belongs to singer and tarento Shoko Nakagawa's（中川翔子）cover of "Type: Wild", one of the ending themes for the 1997-2002 run of the anime "Pocket Monster"（ポケットモンスター）on TV Tokyo. Coming from her December 2019 5th studio album "RGB ~ True Color", I wanted to write about it today since I heard that Nakagawa had recently gotten married so many congratulations to her and her new husband.

When I first heard about "Type: Wild" via Nakagawa, though, I hadn't known about the "Pokemon" connection since there was nothing written about it in the J-Wiki article on "RGB". It actually took the Yahoo Japan search engine to reveal several references to the anime before I realized that it had been a "Pokemon" theme song. 

"Type: Wild" was the 5th ending theme for the series and it was originally recorded by seiyuu/singer Rica Matsumoto（松本梨香）who has been on the blog before under fellow contributor Marcos V.'s paragraph on the singer's other "Pokemon" theme, "Alola!!"（アローラ!!）in his article "Special Selection Vol. II". The original "Type: Wild" was released as one of the songs on Matsumoto's 9th single, "Rival!"（ライバル!）which came out in March 1999, peaking at No. 13 on Oricon. It also appeared on her second BEST compilation "Matsumoto Rica ga Utau Pokemon Best"（松本梨香が歌うポケモンソングベスト...The Best of Pokemon Songs by Rica Matsumoto） from July 2011. 

The original song was written by Akihito Toda（戸田昭吾）and composed/arranged by Hirokazu Tanaka（たなかひろかず）. Both versions are that morning OJ for the kids to get really excited about the franchise and characters (while the parents practice saying "NO!" forcefully in turning down their charges' requests for merch), but the Nakagawa cover as arranged by Kenichi Maeyamada（前山田健一）sounds like a major otagei anthem. Make sure you have the RUB-A535 or other liniment handy when you're swiveling your waist.