The Randy Van Horne Singers -- Meet the Flintstones

 

Before "The Simpsons", there were "The Flintstones", that modern Stone Age family. It was a daily ritual for me and my brother as kids to watch the antics of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble as they got through the daily grind in Bedrock while sometimes taking on side gigs which would usually end badly in front of their long-suffering spouses, Wilma and Betty respectively. Fred and Barney's favourite pastime of bowling wasn't lost on me since my father was also a fan of hitting the pins.

I always got a kick out of the snarky comments out of the animals that were used as appliances. Hanna & Barbera wouldn't get anywhere near the toilet though.

Of course, the other running gag on "The Flintstones" was how they brought on the celebrities and named them in their own hilarious way. The first time that I got to actually see Ann-Margret was through her appearance on the show as Ann-Margrock. And there were Stony Curtis and Cary Granite. If I had got onto the program, maybe my name would have ended up as J-Canucklestone.

A good chunk of my childhood was spent watching "The Flintstones" and I had assumed that I pretty much knew everything there was to learn about this program. But I was wrong. It was only in the last decade that I discovered "The Flintstones" had been the first animated program to get a prime-time slot on ABC; that's quite something considering that I had only seen Fred and Barney as afternoon cartoon characters.

On top of that, I only found out in the last few months that there had been a very different opening and closing sequence and a different theme song for "The Flintstones" in the first two seasons of its 1960-1966 run. The theme song used for both the opening and the ending was "Rise and Shine", a jazzy and upbeat instrumental by Hoyt Curtin. It was actually a song that I had heard as background music in the episodes but I never knew that it was the first theme. I also have to give thanks to YouTube and the uploader Steven Brandt for showing me the opening and ending credits for the very first time in my life.

Ah, as of Season 3, this was the opening credit sequence that greeted me after getting home from school or finishing off lunch. It was the swing jazz orchestra by Curtin and the Randy Van Horne Singers behind one of Western animation's most famous theme songs "Meet the Flintstones" right when Fred happily screams "Yabba-dabba-doo!" when work is done and it's time to head home. 

Although "Meet the Flintstones" wouldn't become the official theme until late 1962, Wikipedia has reported that its composition by Curtin along with Hanna & Barbera had taken place in 1961 so for this ROY, I'm gonna go with that latter year and find out what were the big hits in Japan during that time.

Kyu Sakamoto -- Ue wo Muite Arukou (上を向いて歩こう)

Mari Watanabe -- Tokyo Dodonpa Musume （東京ドドンパ娘）

Sachiko Nishida -- Coffee Rumba （コーヒー・ルンバ）

Mari Watanabe/Yosui Inoue/Yoeko Kurahashi -- Tokyo Dodonpa Musume （東京ドドンパ娘）

I was watching NHK's "Kayo Concert"（歌謡コンサート）program as I do most Tuesday nights on TV Japan, and the theme of the week was "passionate kayo". Well, one of the singers came on to do this somewhat jazzy number which sounded like a slightly slowed-down old boogie, and the title caught my eye: "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume". "Tokyo"was a given, and "Musume" I knew as "daughter" or just plain "girl". However, that middle "Dondonpa" got my curiosity going, so I decided to do a bit of searching on my usual sources of YouTube and Wikipedia, and I found the original version which was sung by 18 or 19-year-old Mari Watanabe（渡辺マリ）, her 2nd single. It was written by Tetsuo Miyagawa（宮川哲夫） (who later gave lyrics to Yukio Hashi's haunting "Muhyou"), and composed by Yoichi Suzuki（鈴木庸一）.

With the end of the Second World War, jazz and Latin music started flooding like a young river into Japan, and using the analogy of the old 49ers in California, the gold from the panning here brought about the genre of Mood Kayo into the clubs and bars of Tokyo. What I didn't know was that there was also a birth of a smaller genre called Dodonpa in the 1960s. I came across a couple of explanations for the derivation of the genre on J-Wiki, but I actually liked what one kind person answered on a Goo Q & A in Japanese: that it was a Latin rhythm, rumba, given the Japanese kayo kyoku arrangement. There is also a story that Philippine bands performing in Kyoto helped to give rise to Dodonpa via the mambo. Dodonpa is onomatopoeic...I took a listen to some of the other songs of this genre, and they all have that same sort of brass "buh-boom-POW" phrasing. To me, Dodonpa also incorporates some of that Big Band Swing from the 30s and 40s.

"Tokyo Dodonpa Musume"(Tokyo Dodonpa Girl) started off all things Dodonpa, and the single ended up selling over a million records. It also seems like everything ended at that song since despite Dodonpa songs getting created and released, even one by Hibari Misora（美空ひばり）, none of them ever hit the heights that Watanabe's magnum opus did.

(23:05)

Forty years later, Yosui Inoue（井上陽水）gave his own dynamic version of "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume" with an assist from a cool organ in 2001 via his album of covers titled "United Cover", which peaked at No. 2 on Oricon.

Yoeko Kurahashi（倉橋ヨエコ） has been a name that I've seen a lot in the CD stores back in Tokyo but never really explored. Actually, I was trying to find stuff by one of my favourite unsung singers, Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）, but I often kept seeing Yoeko's tab. After hearing her 2002 cover of "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume", though, I think I will explore a bit more about her since she's been labeled as a singer of "jazz kayo". Also, the official music video for the cover is a pretty nifty 50s-style motif done in a Monty Python animated style (unfortunately, that's been taken down so Madonna has come in to lend a hand).

This is Hibari Misora's contribution to the dodonpa fad, logically titled "Hibari no Dodonpa"（ひばりのドドンパ...Hibari's Dodonpa). It comes in at the 56-second mark.