10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 8

Papas Fritas are a really tough band to summarize beyond “late 90s Indie Pop,” because they kind of played whatever. From the Garage Rock of “Sing About Me” to the Psychedelia of “Hey Hey You Say” to the slinky pseudo-Jazz of the song in question: “Way You Walk,” Papas Fritas were all over the place. That’s probably part of the reason they weren’t bigger than they were, but of course that’s the primary selling point to listeners of a certain persuasion. I know I liked ‘em a lot at peak of my Indie Hipster days, and was quite disappointed to find they broke up right around the time I started getting into that stuff. And even now that I’ve largely moved past that, “Way You Walk” still sticks with me. The combination of Jazz melody and Acoustic Rock performance reminds me a lot of The Zombies, though the insistent, pulsing bass line keeps the sound routed firmly in the 90s. In a genre known for getting aggressively twee and terminally quirky, “Way You Walk” is coooooooool. Moody, mysterious, and aloof, this is the kind of song that just sounds like it was recorded while wearing sunglasses. I don’t even know what sunglasses sound like, but they’re audible in this recording it’s that cool. More than cool enough to make a slick closing credits sequence for an anime, preferably over art of the cast wearing sunglasses. Maybe a sort of Pop Art thing with a lot of blocky colors to go with the vaguely retro vibe? I dunno, I’ve suggested that sort of thing before, but it’s not like there aren't a lot of anime that do that style. But that’s just the thing: what KIND of anime?

Papas Fritas are a really tough band to summarize beyond “late 90s Indie Pop,” because they kind of played whatever. From the Garage Rock of “Sing About Me” to the Psychedelia of “Hey Hey You Say” to the slinky pseudo-Jazz of the song in question: “Way You Walk,” Papas Fritas were all over the place. That’s probably part of the reason they weren’t bigger than they were, but of course that’s the primary selling point to listeners of a certain persuasion. I know I liked ‘em a lot at peak of my Indie Hipster days, and was quite disappointed to find they broke up right around the time I started getting into that stuff. And even now that I’ve largely moved past that, “Way You Walk” still sticks with me. The combination of Jazz melody and Acoustic Rock performance reminds me a lot of The Zombies, though the insistent, pulsing bass line keeps the sound routed firmly in the 90s. In a genre known for getting aggressively twee and terminally quirky, “Way You Walk” is coooooooool. Moody, mysterious, and aloof, this is the kind of song that just sounds like it was recorded while wearing sunglasses. I don’t even know what sunglessed sound like, but they’re audible in this recording it’s that cool. More than cool enough to make a slick closing credits sequence for an anime, preferably over art of the cast wearing sunglasses. Maybe a sort of Pop Art thing with a lot of blocky colors to go with the vaguely retro vibe? I dunno, I’ve suggested that sort of thing before, but it’s not like there aren't a lot of anime that do that style. But that’s just the thing: what KIND of anime?

I went on a bit of a conceptual journey on this one, and I’m gonna make you all go on that journey with me! WHEEE! The first thing I knew was this anime needed to be about solving mysteries. This song just sounds like snooping around, sneaking up behind people, and peaking around corners. Heck, even that recurring line “I can tell by the way you walk” and its variations all call to mind a person trying to piece together the clues and uncover the truth. So we’ve got some kind of mystery of the week formula, but who does the solving?

My first inclination was a school club setting, maybe a bunch of rich kids at a private academy playing detective, but using the considerable wealth of their families to do a lot more than your average gang of teenage gumshoes would have. But the thing is… there’s already too many anime about school clubs and the like. Heck, Clamp School Detectives basically did this whole idea already anyway. I like the idea of kids essentially PLAYING at crime-solving but still getting caught up in the real thing, though, so now it was a matter of coming up with a better setting.

Inclination number two was to make the show about an idol group, a team of aspiring singers where one is a huge mystery buff who constantly notices fishy stuff going on around her. I mean, it’s show business, of course there’s always fishy stuff going on, right? Maybe the one mystery buff got that way because she has family who are ACTUAL detectives and police officers, so when she and the rest of the group solve the mystery of the week, they arrange for one of those Proper Authorities to “accidentally” come across some evidence to let them make the arrest. After all, they can’t report the shady stuff they find out about directly. Not only would that blow their cover, but it would probably endanger their careers! Who wants to book an act who call the cops when they see creeps? Everyone doing the booking IS a creep! I do like this idea, but it has one fatal flaw for the purposes of this blog: a show about an idol group would never license music from some other source. They only way it’d ever get funded in the FIRST place would be to serve as a means of promoting an ACTUAL idol group, and all the music would need to come from them. That’s just Anime Business 101.

So I want them to be in the entertainment industry for the constant supply of scumbags to bust, but it can’t be a musical group. At first I thought about models, but my admittedly limited knowledge of how the modeling industry works suggest that “groups” of models aren’t really a thing. And if Scooby Doo has taught us anything, it’s that animated teens solving mysteries must do so in groups of three to five.

And then it hit me: TV! They’re the cast of a show! That’s an excuse to keep the characters together as a unit, and it opens up a whole new gimmick for the concept. What if the show they’re staring in is ALSO about a team of kids solving mysteries? Like, the fictional show could be the original idea about rich kids playing detective, but one of the stars ACTUALLY fancies herself a detective for real and keeps dragging her co-stars into her investigations. Of course, the “fictional” characters would be comically different from the “real” kids, like maybe there’s a snooty sophisticated girly-girl character but the actress is a filthy degenerate otaku. They’d still do their crime-solving in secret, though, both to save their careers and also to avoid anyone learning that they’d probably have to do a LOT of illegal snooping around to get the dirt on the villain of the week. Speaking of which, maybe the “main character has law enforcement family” plot device is a bit too obvious. Like, in-universe, I mean. It might be better to have a rotating cast of police detective and tabloid reporters and other such whistleblowers that the cast would arrange to be in the right place at the right time to see the baddie get exposed. All the better for maintaining our heroes’ cover, AND it’d keep the formula from getting too stale.

Speaking of which, the addition of the show-within-a-show concept would allow for any number of narrative tricks. Maybe episodes could play around with making the audience unsure if a scene is happening in the show or “real life”? Maybe some plot point from the show’s script gives somebody a flash of inspiration regarding the real case? Or maybe a similarity between the real case and the fictional script makes it hard for the cast to focus on set? Or perhaps we could really go meta and have the fictional version of the crime resolve in a sanitized, kid-friendly, “TV version” to serve as an ironic counterpoint to the messy downer that is real life crimefighting.

Because let’s face it, I’ve danced around this as much as I can, but a show about people in show business investigating mysteries involving other people in show business would lend itself to a LOT of really icky storylines. From gross directors/producers to sketchy managers and showbiz parents to stalkers and blackmailers of all varieties, this is a concept that could go DARK if it really wanted. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be forced into exclusively investigation really harmless mysteries (“Oh no! Our guest star of the week has had her pet poodle taken captive by a cult!”) …but that really seems lame. I’d rather see the fictional show do laughably harmless plotlines so that when the “real” plot goes dark, there’s a subliminal sense of the anime saying “What, you’d rather watch THAT cheesy nonsense?” The tonal whiplash might not work, but that’s the idea I’ve got.

Also, I’d love it if the final episode or movie or whatever involved the show-within-a-show characters getting a show made about them, so that now we’d have actors who solve crimes in real life staring as fictional detectives who are now becoming actors and solving their own fictional mysteries. Let’s see if we can make reality itself collapse into a narrative singularity!

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Okay, so a bit of housekeeping here: I’m going to TRY to get another blog done in December, but as usual I went and bit off a pretty massive amount of Christmas work to chew on. I’m trying hard to get as much of it done BEFORE December as possible, so hopefully I won’t have to flake on getting the next one done. Just consider this fair warning that I MIGHT wind up not getting the 9th one done until January.