Wasabi Mizuta -- Odore...Dore...Dora...Doraemon Ondo 2007（踊れどれドラドラえもん音頭）

 

I was watching the Saturday night news on NHK and noticed a feature on anison Bon Odori（盆踊り...Bon Dance）. Yes, tis the season for vacations and summer festivals, and of course, almost all of these will include the traditional folk dance en masse. Apparently now though, fans of anime and anime theme songs can dance to those Bon Odori style. 

Mind you, you might be looking at the above and wondering in some horror about how a mass of folks can dance that packed together during the notoriously torrid summer that Japan is enduring. Well for one thing, the above video was actually taken a few months ago when the temperatures were still reasonable and for another, not many people will turn down a Bon Odori opportunity especially when favourite songs are involved and in the above, the fans are dancing to stuff including "Kibun Jojo"（気分上々↑↑）, "MatsuKen Samba II"（マツケンサンバ II） and "Bling-Bang-Bang-Born".

Perhaps the reason behind anison Bon Odori is that over the decades, a number of anime may have spawned their own festival songs of summer. I've written about a couple of them at the very least. One is Mami Koyama & Columbia Yurikago Kai's（小山茉美・コロムビアゆりかご会）"Arale-chan Ondo"（アラレちゃん音頭）in "Dr. Slump"（Dr.スランプ）from 1981 and then even earlier, the venerable franchise "Doraemon"（ドラえもん）came up with "Doraemon Ondo"（ドラえもん音頭）in 1979 with the title character's longest-serving seiyuu Nobuyo Ohyama（大山のぶ代）singing that one just when she first started voicing the genius earless cat.

Well, Ohyama passed the baton over to seiyuu Wasabi Mizuta（水田わさび）in 2005 and evidently, she was assigned to sing her own traditional Doraemon-themed minyo titled "Odore...Dore...Dora...Doraemon Ondo" (Doraemon Traditional Folk Song Dance) which was written by Mike Sugiyama（マイクスギヤマ）and composed by Kan Sawada（沢田完）. For some reason, I keep seeing the 2007 version so we're going to go with that. As would be the case with any traditional folk song that demands group participation, it's plenty boisterous, grand and upbeat. I have to also admit that I liked the little shoulder shimmy that Doraemon does at the beginning there in the above video. Mizuta is also assisted by the Mori no Ki Children's Chorus（森の木児童合唱団）.

The video below was uploaded about a year ago and I have to give my respects to the folks in the character costumes as they performed at Roppongi Hills. As I remember, Tokyo was just as boiling hot back then as it is now. Hopefully, they received danger pay.