30 Day Idol Challenge, Day 05 – My Favorite Idol Group (Ever!)
My current favorite is AKB48. Of course. Anyone knowing me from just this blog would tell you that. But I don’t like to be predictable. I’m better than that. Time is just a persistent illusion. I won’t be bound by that. I can traverse the space of possibilities through the axis of time and land on 2004 Morning Musume, because I’m the guy with the blog and this challenge has no judge. So the actual answer is:
1th-6th Gen Morning Musume
Sorry AKB48. You’re great, I have no difficulty at all saying you beat current Momusu in every way and deserve it, you’ve recently got your own comedy show to rival the old similar Hello! Morning segment which is awesome, and in every other post in this blog I’ll keep my current view of loving you. But today you’re fighting with every memory I have of Morning Musume’s good times, and you lose. Such is life. Go sit in the corner until I’m done with this post.
I’m not sure about the exact line up that is my favorite. Truth is, I don’t care. I’ve always been more of a TV shows fan, and in this case that means Hello! Morning, and they were all on it. Even the graduated members continued to appear frequently on the show, so graduations didn’t matter too much for me. Actually, when I was watching the shows most of the members were gone already, since the first H!M torrent I saw was literally for the last episode. I watched the whole thing in a crazy order, but mostly going backwards. Anyway, my favorite years for H!M were 2003-2004, so that’s it. Gokkies FTW, and Konno 4ever!
I can’t avoid comparing to AKB since they’re the runner-ups, so be it. Momusu wins here because it was stronger as a group. To some extent, my view here is biased by the sheer amount of content I’ve seen from this era of Momusu over the years. But let’s take the example of Hello! Morning. There were a lot of bad segments in that show. There was a tendency to let these very bad segments run for weeks, probably because they were all recorded already and they didn’t want to waste the effort. In many ways, I’ve found AKBINGO! and Shuukan AKB to be better than Hello! Morning ever was, especially as far as direction goes. But… It was one show. With one core group of girls. Regularly. It might be fair to rotate members in a big group like AKB, but I feel like every few months there’s a different crop of new girls appearing regularly on their shows, and the senbatsu are only on AKBINGO! these days. A constant flux of different member combinations don’t give me much of a feel for the “group”. Hello! Morning was much more concentrated. It made you know the girls a lot better. It was also completely presented by them, which is much better – there’s a big difference between seeing a comedian making fun of a member and a member making fun of another, and I prefer the latter. It also meant the “comedian making fun” role was played mostly by the Great Taka-san from Utaban, the best veteran in this business… Although he messed it up on the last few times Momusu was on Utaban, didn’t seem to even be trying. If not for the fact that AKB was never on the show, I’d suggest he got a call from his old pal AkiP to stop promoting the competition. Well, it was good while it lasted.
By the way, I cited AKB’s comedy show, Bimyo~, a few paragraphs above. Well, it doesn’t really rival the Hello! Morning one. In Bimyo~, you have different members, in different roles, every episode. In Hello! Morning, members had specific characters. They were tailored to their idol personas – like old lady Yasuda, police chief Yuuko, annoying and loud police officer Yaguchi. It was obvious there was a lot of improv going on. H!M wins.
Hey, doing a full AKB48 x Momusu post is just not going to happen on a weekday, so I’ll leave the post here. Old Morning Musume is my favorite idol group. Case closed.
