In these weekly posts, I gather all the variety appearances of AKB members and briefly summarize what happened. After last week’s post I realized that posting only summaries doesn’t feel right so I added review parts to a few programs.
Summary: This week’s Andare upload featured Team 4 members who had not been on the show in a long while, but no Mariko (again) as it happened to be a Thursday episode. The four started by talking about what they have been doing since they appeared last time on the show and pondered whether they have made any development. At first they were made to clear various challenges: imitating Funassyi for 30 seconds, acting out Andare’s pervert writer’s moe line, pulling off 3 weird facial expression in a row, dancing UZA as energetically as they can, doing monoboke 3 times in a row and imitating Miichan for 30 seconds. In the following corner the members were challenged to talk alone for a minute and they ended up talking about each other. Ayanan revealed Yuiri to be perverted, Yuiri exposed Ayanan being a bit of a kusogaki while Yuurin claimed Mogi to be excessively negative and Mogi talked about how easily Yuurin feels down despite what she claims in her catchphrase. In the final corner the girls acted out moe situation and lines related to high school students (as all of them go to high school right now).
Review: In my opinion this Andare episode showed these girls at their very best. In fact, I don’t even remember seeing them do so well in variety shows until now. It is about time their revered talking skills from the theater performances can be seen in variety. All four of them were energetically involved in keeping the show running and clearly had fun as well. They were surprisingly amazing in what I would call “flow talk”: the sort of talk in which the members funnily force someone to do a task no one wants to do. They had various patterns for that and all of them worked very smoothly – even rivalling what Andare veterans usually do on the show. Their style clearly focused on the point that all the members kept talking without a stop. Even when one member was under the spotlight the others would loudly cheer on and comment from the background. That style has its pros and cons: it worked very well in this episode, but it can also be quite overbearing when done in the wrong situation. The most obvious winner this week was Mogi who introduced a new character that will surely turn into a fan favorite. Heck, she even went as far as to (briefly) imitate Hard Gay even without her new character.
This week’s AKBingo presented the first half of the annual Lucky Girl Ranking in which the members’ fortune for the next year is decided. Since last year’s result was a fiasco with the top and bottom actually being the other way around, the regular fortune-teller Shimada is accompanied by another one, Getters’ Iida, a former comedian. His ‘fortune-telling’ was more about the members’ personality instead of reading from hands. Most of the talk this time is centered around Iida’s tidbits about the members’ personality quirks and future possibilities which includes a prediction of Takamina gaining more acting work (and that led to her showing that she can cry fast). There were lots of HKT members featured in this week’s episode, but it looks like AKB is in the spotlight in the second part. I will be posting an analysis of this episode after next week’s episode so I can approach the Lucky Girl Ranking in its entirety.
Variety 48 