Decisive Battle (of Musical Trivia)

Fellow nerds, help me out.

So I like Pink Lady, the Japanese duo who scored big in the late 70s and early 80s and, as I noted in a now-years-old post, ultimately wound up on a variety show on NBC despite the fact that neither member spoke English. (It’s quite the story, actually. Do click through to the original post, if you value from truly bizarre east-meets-west pop culture fusion.) And I recently happened upon a cache of Pink Lady videos on YouTube and caught the follwing rendition of “Southpaw.”

The music at the beginning — from 0:07 onward especially — reminded me of a Final Fantasy battle theme, but I can’t remember which. I can hear it in my head, but I just can’t place the game it came from. I poked around some more on YouTube and ended up with what seems to be a remade, hyped-up version of one of the original NES Final Fantasy tracks.

And this is pretty close, I guess, but the thing is I never played this glossy version of the original Final Fantasy. So is this it? Or is it a different battle theme I’m thinking of? If it is, in fact, this Final Fantasy 1 song, I’m guessing that the game music was a tribute to Pink Lady, since “Southpaw” came out in 1978, nine years before Final Fantasy taught the world about Red Mages and Bahamut. I eagerly await your thoughtful responses on this most urgent matter.

In testament to the greatness of Pink Lady, I’ll point out that they’re one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the American Billboard Top 40, the other being Kyu Sakamoto, whose 1961 globe-spanning hit found considerable success in the U.S. as “Sukiyaki.” (The song’s path from a tearful Japanese song to an American hit about a stewed beef dish made for another previous post on this blog, by the way.) Here’s that one American-approved Pink Lady song, “Kiss in the Dark”:

Clearly, it did well with the disco crowd. It’s all the more impressive to me because the Pink Lady singers were singing the translated, English lyrics phonetically. Truthfully, they hadn’t a clue what they were saying, not that their performance reflects this.

But yes — nerds? What say you?

Video games and pop music, previously:

• The Pixies do the theme from NARC
• Final Fantasy (the artist, not the game) and the star maze song from Super Mario Land 2
• Janet Jackson sampled Legend of Mana
• The ice music from Donkey Kong Country 2 seemed to have “been inspired by” a Vangelis track
• The Great Giana Sisters sounds not unlike electroclash
• Scissor Sisters and Mega Man
• Video game-y lyrics in Magic Wands’ “Black Magic”
• The Super Mario Bros. theme and Van Halen’s “Jump,” allegedly 

Pink Typhoon

I think we can start here.

I know, I know. Not only is this the first and probably only time I've heard anything about Here's Boomer, but the prospect of The Facts of Life being a "new series" is so strange to me that it's funny. (Also, please note the presence of Molly Ringwald among the show's main cast before her character, whose name is also Molly, was blinked into obscurity.) Then, of course, there's the show that I'm focusing on in this post: Pink Lady, which before it was cancelled was better known as Pink Lady and Jeff. It featured comedian Jeff Altman — of whom I'm only aware otherwise as being one of the lesser Hoggs on Dukes of Hazard — and the Japanese pop group Pink Lady side-by-side, Tony Orlando & Dawn-style.

Yes, the name of the band in which two ladies don't always wear pink is Pink Lady, singular. I suppose Pink Ladies would create associations with Grease, though, so I can forgive this bit. Believe me, the group's name is small potatoes compared to the staggering weirdness that's going on here.

I learned of Pink Lady and Jeff only after seeing it listed on the Chicago Tribune's list of the 25 worst TV shows of all time. (Also dinged: Petticoat Junction, Small Wonder and My Mother the Car.) The purported suckiness of Pink Lady and Jeff stemmed in part from clunky jokes and the fact that singers Mie and Kei spoke almost no English and had to learn their lines and lyrics phonetically. You can't really tell, at least, in their cover of "Boogie Wonderland," as they sing with appropriate funk levels and in accents no worse than anybody else who didn't grow up speaking English.

Occasionally, however, they'd give these poor ladies a break and let them sing one of the songs that made them such a huge hit in Japan. Like this below performance of "Monster," in which Mie and Kei dress up like Captain EO.

They seem like they're having more fun when they sing in Japanese. I'd place their sound somewhere between the B-52s and The Go! Team, which might help explain why American audiences weren't too interested in Mie and Kei's antics, Jeff Altman or no Jeff Altman. Shortly into the run of Pink Lady and Jeff — five episodes, according to IMDb — the show was canned by NBC. Mie and Kei trudged back to Japan, with only the fawning love of millions of fans to comfort them, and the once-omnipresent variety show format sputtered and died. Eventually, Mie and Kei shed their Pink Lady personas and returned to being Mitsuyo Nemoto and Keiko Masuda, the names under which they had successful acting and solo singing careers.

But that's not to say Pink Lady and Jeff can't be remembered for being not just a colossal failure but a flamingly colossal failure that emits multicolored rays of lights and can be seen from well beyond the Shizouka Prefacture. Personally, I can't wonder how life might have ended up if this show were the one to run for nine seasons instead of The Facts of Life, perhaps even incorporating Mrs. Garrett and Tootie after the hypothetical demise of Facts. Pink Lady and Jeff stands as a testament both the astounding weirdness that can result when American and Japanese pop culture collide and to network TV's desire to capitalize on quite possibly anything it can. (Come to think of it, in light of the looming TV writers' strike, I wonder the ladies of Pink Lady might be asked to clear their schedules on Monday and head back to our shores.)

On that note, I'm leaving you with one last bit by Mie and Kei: their Japanese hit single "UFO," which they also performed on the show in their native language. Between the green-screened space opera backgrounds and the back-up dancers who look like extras from Xanadu, you have to admit that, if nothing else, it's a spectacle you wouldn't have thought would have been aired on prime time.