Hiroshi Wakagi, The Blessin' Four and Misuzu Children's Choral Group -- Tatakae! Thunder（戦え!サンダー）

 

Over the past several weeks, I've seen hurricane after hurricane along with torrential rains batter parts of Japan including the prefecture where I'd resided for many years: Chiba. Then yesterday, parts of my own province, including Toronto, got walloped by what has been called "a once-in-a-century storm" (although I think they'll probably come once every other year now). We got majorly pummeled by a couple of lines of thunderstorms and that second line that hit us around the dinner hour came with the loudest thunder cracks that I'd ever heard in my life. I was worried about power outages and there were plenty of those in the Greater Toronto Area but luckily, our neighbourhood was spared from those.

(1:07)

Last year, I used Marvel's "Thunderbolts" movie to segue into the opening theme for the 1972 NTV tokusatsu series "Thunder Mask"（サンダーマスク）. Well, I'm using yesterday's actual storm-of-the-century to introduce the ending theme for the show. "Tatakae! Thunder" (Fight! Thunder) was written by Yoichi Azuma（東洋一）and composed by Takeo Watanabe（渡辺岳夫）as this typical heroic tokusatsu song performed by the same entities behind the opening theme "Thunder Mask": Hiroshi Wakagi（若木ヒロシ）the Misuzu Children's Choral Group（みすず児童合唱団） and the vocal group The Blessin' Four（ ザ・フレッシング・フォー）. The arrangement by Yuushi Matsuyama（松山祐士）is a familiar one with the crisp battery of horns, the shimmering strings and the groovy bass. All that scary thunder will go away now!