The Shounen Club 30 April 2000 review

Forgot to mention in my first post about how much of the early Shounen Club episodes I will be able to review. I did go looking for more before starting this and the only 2000 and 2001 episodes I found had Chinese hard subs on them, and I refuse to add those episodes to my collection. So this means this is the only other 2000 episode I have and I only have three episodes from 2001. On the plus side I did find more 2002 episodes so there was a good gap their filled. Especially since these early episodes aired weekly from what I can tell.

Also I found the last half hour episode from 2003 so I can confirm I have everything from March 2003 onward. But what is great about having that episode is that being the final episode before the big changes it has a lot of clips of earlier shows, which not only includes those I do not have but the episode is in much better quality than a lot of these earlier episodes.

So with that out of the way time to review the April 30th episode of SC. And this time it will be more focused on what I like and such and not so much a rundown of everything that happened like the first review.

And we get Nishikido Ryo as one of the guests for this episode. And he is such a tiny little Junior at this time.  I know as an adult he is not exactly tall, but I just did not expect him to be so short when he was younger.

Really beginning to notice how promoted Hasegawa Jun is during this time. He may not be up there with Yamashita Tomohisa but he is not that far behind. Really makes me wonder what happened with him not debuting with Yamapi or the other members of the 4TOPS.

I do not think I am getting over tiny Ryo anytime soon. He is performing Secret Agent Man here and the only thing that surprises me more than his size is how different he sounded as a child.

Jimmy Mackey got to cover Livin' La Vida Loca, which just seems so out of place there. But then again IIRC the song was a big hit in Japan so that may explain why this exists.

The guests for the episode were Arashi and Nishikido Ryo. It is sometimes hard to remember that back then Arashi was the recently debuted group. I think it shows that some things never change with the amount of presence they have on the program so soon after debut. It really makes me want to have more of these early episodes to see how long it took them to stop showing up on SC on a regular basis.

They had Ikuta Toma this time go out and do the location interview with Arashi this time at the shooting of their PV, and I think it went a bit better. Arashi teased Toma a bit and Sakurai Sho was really energetic.

They had a sports day in Osaka were the Juniors went against another team. Shibutani Subaru and Imai Tsubasa were the leads of the Junior team and Akanishi Jin got to interview everyone there.

Hasegawa managed to make it to home and it was cute how he was just gushing about it. Subaru of course was rather proud of him.

Arashi are perrforming Sunrise Nippon again, this time with just sticking to the one stage. I do not get why Ohno Satoshi and Sakurai Sho have different tops, plaid shirts, than the other three, black jackets. Especially as they rarely stood between the other three so it was not if they were balancing the look of the formations.

The Junior challenge this time ended up being a version of janken (paper, rock, scissors) where when the winner won they had to say a direction while at the same time the loser had to guess what that direction would be and try not to look in it.

I rather love that there were audience members laughing at the fact that Yamapi had the ball backwards so it was spelling IOH instead of HOI.

It is little Goseki Koichi in this episode. It is amazing how long he had to wait to debut and how happy I am he and the other A.B.C. members got that chance after being with Johnny's for so long.

As Goseki and Ueda were the winners of their rounds they got to face off against each other. And the winner actually got a medal, not just a lei of gold garland.

Not really a fan of Kamenashi Kazuya but I could not help but think that he looked kinda adorable as a young Junior here. He was not featured at all in the first episode but he does get his name on the screen with this one.

Ryo gets featured a lot in the episode. He gets to sing here with the other tiny Juniors like Goseki. Ryo of course is the one in black. Whoever is in charge of costumes seems to like him in black and white a lot.

And this is Yamapi and Ryo standing next to each other. No, Yamapi is not standing on anything, that is the natural difference in height between the two.

Little Taguchi Junnosuke! I missed him in the rest of the episode but at least he gets some screen time in the final performance for the show.