10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 1 (Patreon)

Yes, you read that title right. I’m doing another set of these anime theme blogs but with songs that *gasp* AREN’T FROM JAPAN! How dare I call myself a weeb? Well, first of all, I don’t. Second, we live in a world where “Roundabout” by Yes can officially call itself an “anime song.” Everybody from Duran Duran to Frank Sinatra can technically claim a spot on your anime theme playlist if you feel like it. If the creators are wacky enough to really fight for it (or, more importantly, PAY for it), they could theoretically get whatever song they wanted to bookend their series. Who’s to say the following ten songs COULDN’T get licensed for some show? Besides, Japanese or not, it’s still an excuse for me to force my weird musical tastes upon others AND formulate my own ideas for weird new anime. As long as I get to keep doing that, who CARES if the blog concept makes any sense? And besides, I actually DO have a list of ten more Japanese songs just waiting for me to get to them. I’ll do those just as soon as this one wraps up. Sometimes I just gotta do something for me. Indulge me a bit, will ya? Still, in the interest of acknowledging how much trickier it is in for a Real Life Japanese series to use a Western song as a theme (especially if they ALSO want to keep using it in other parts of the world), I’ll make a point of including some justification for WHY these theoretical Japanese productions would go the extra mile for the specific Western song in question. After all, there’s no creative choice so weird that the anime industry doesn’t have SOME kind of precedent for it. This is a business of weird people doing weird things, so why SHOULDN’T I go ahead and imagine whatever I want? Friggin’ Ray Charles has a song in an anime. My imagination has NOTHING on reality, so I’ll just imagine whatever.

Well, okay, I actually DID lay down one ground rule for myself here. Aside from the obvious “no Japanese bands this time” guideline, I also made a point of limiting myself to songs from no further back than the early-to-mid 90s. I know that sounds like it covers a lot of ground, and it certainly does, you also have to remember who you’re talking to here. I easily could fill a whole ten-part blog series just on 60s songs I think would make good anime themes, and I probably will one of these days. Limiting myself to comparatively “modern” music was actually quite a challenge. Case in point, anybody who actually paid attention during all those Far Out There Character Soundtrack blogs will find a few of these songs familiar, since I already talked about them there… but even the people who DID read those have already forgotten what was in them, so even if I repeat myself it’s not like anyone will notice. The point is, I deliberately gave myself a challenge by focusing on eras I don’t listen to as much, and STILL managed to come up with a full set of ten songs to work with. Yay me!

So anyway, song number one: “Disconnect The Dots” by of Montreal. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating that of Montreal loom large over a rare period in my life where I actually DID give a crap about modern music. I was raised almost exclusively on Oldies radio, and when I started amassing my own record collection I branched out into the less radio-friendly world of Psychedelia (this was also when my hair started to grow).  I was really super into Syd Barrett for a while, and searching for other artists with a similar style led me to stumble onto the Elephant 6 collective of Indie artists, including of Montreal. In retrospect, the reviews that brought of Montreal to my attention were a bit misguided, as albums like The Gay Parade and Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies are arguably more indebted to Brian Wilson at his most twee than Syd Barrett. That’s a bit of a moot point, though, since by the time I stumbled onto of Montreal, head honcho Kevin Barnes had undergone one of MANY shifts in style and started making deceptively catchy Indie Pop with strong Electronic flourishes. The albums Satanic Panic in the Attic and Sunlandic Twins were pretty much the soundtrack of my college years, and even if you don’t THINK you know them, I guarantee you’ve heard at least one of those songs. "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)" is better known amongst the general populace as “that song that was the Outback Steakhouse jingle for a while.” Now, of Montreal also wound up being my first experience of a band I was actively a fan of turning to crap (it’s been years since anything they did held any appeal to me whatsoever) and it would be just the first of many. That’s a big part of the reason I currently only bother with artists who’ve been dead or broken up for decades. Artists who aren’t still around to make any new things can’t do anything to disappoint you, right?

I don’t remember if “Disconnect The Dots” was the first Golden Age Of Montreal song I heard, but there’s a good chance it was because I definitely DO remember it was their one music video available to stream on Yahoo Music. Heck, I’m not sure if of Montreal even DID music videos before this point. I can’t imagine the eighteen minute "The Hopeless Opus or The Great Battle of the Unfriendly Ridiculous" was getting played on MTV. One way or another, though, I definitely loved “Disconnect The Dots” right from the start. It’s got a KILLER synth riff, a super catchy melody, and a pleasantly broad range of moods for a sub-five minute tune: from punchy to dreamy and back without ever sacrificing any energy and drive. It’s got those Lounge/Jazz chord changes that were so trendy in Indie Pop around the turn of the millennium. Heck, it’s even got hand claps! That’s always the sign of a sure winner! And right from the start, I remember thinking “Disconnect The Dots” would make a killer opening theme to some kind of show. But WHAT kind?

Why, a Magical Girl show, that’s what! Now, we’ve already seen me spend a previous blog imagining a somewhat… different take on the Magical Girl genre, at least compared to what most of us modern, post-Sailor Moon kids know about it. But this idea here looks like a more contemporary, hero team kind of show, right? Am I playing the genre straight this time? A standard Precure-style mystical adventure? Of COURSE I’m not! Don’t be silly!

First off, you might have picked up something odd about the image layout here, something that recalls a certain OTHER blog from a little while back. See, there’s a not-quite-rule I’ve noticed about these shows with teams of heroes: if one of them starts out as a villain but then reforms part-way through the show, that almost ALWAYS turns out to be The Best Character. Like the one you’re thinking about right now. Yeah, that one, you know who I mean. So I’m thinking: why not just fill the ENTIRE team with best characters? Or at least mostly?

Basically, this show would be the epilogue of some OTHER show we don’t actually see outside of flashbacks. A shiny sparkly magical kingdom in a realm with no wars or traffic accidents got threatened by the kingdoms of darkness, and it was up to the wholesome good role model magical princess to use her goodie good powers and save the day. The bad guy kingdoms tried to send their own EVIL magic princesses to stop the good one, but the power of love and friendship and sparkles turned them all good and they teamed up to beat the baddies once and for all. Fast forward a while, and that magical princess is now a magical QUEEN with a daughter of her own. Weird royal traditions say that magical princesses need to go study abroad incognito to get a better understanding of what non-mystical non-royal life is like, though they usually still go to another magical land to do it. This particular princess, however, is a quirky type and wants to visit this weird, nasty, primitive, hostile, backwater world that’s so backwards that they don’t even know how to USE magic. Ya know, OUR world. Obviously, the princess can’t be allowed to visit such a dangerous world without plenty of supervision, so the Queen assigns the formerly-bad now-reformed other magical girls to serve as her bodyguards. And thus begins our show, as the innocent naive princess learns about life on Earth under the watchful eyes of her over-protective “aunts.”

Now, to be clear, while the backstory definitely implies a Sailor Moon/Pretty Cure style Action/Adventure series, that isn’t actually what this show would be. No uber-villain sending out monsters of the week as part of a plan of world domination or the Queen’s enemies hunting down the princess for revenge or anything like that. Rather, this idea would hearken back more to the OG magical girl shows where the main character’s ability to transform was kind of the whole point all unto itself. We might occasionally see other mystical characters pop up from time to time, and they might even cause problems that need fixing, but the main characters would never have to undertake an arc-long quest to vanquish them or anything. In fact, part of the joke could be the princess’s guardians THINKING they’ve stumbled onto some world-ending threat, only for it to turn out that the dark warlock from the shadow realm is only on Earth to stock up on snacks he can’t get anywhere else or some other totally benign explanation.

And that’s the REAL main gag of the show: not so much the Fish Out Of Water aspect of magical characters interacting with a non-magical world, but specifically magical GIRL characters interacting with a non-magical girl world. The guardian characters, with their background in villainy and a lifetime lived by epic fairy tale rules, are constantly on the look out for Bad Guys who need to be thwarted by the forces of Good. The random delivery guy who drops by the house unannounced? Clearly a spy from some nefarious evil kingdom looking to kidnap the princess. Better wipe his memory to make sure her location isn’t revealed, even if the hole in his memory leaves him incapable of performing his job or living a normal life. That kind of stuff. But at the same time, our princess character doesn’t realize what kind of show she’s actually in either. She wanders around thinking she can and should solve all of life’s problems with a literal wave of a magic wand, never considering the consequences of her actions. Say, maybe she passes a street musician and decides more people should listen to him, so she enchants his instrument to musically attract the attention of others… which turns out to brainwash them until the musician is constantly mobbed by crowds, which drives him insane and leads him to form a musical cult. Either way, the climax of each episode would be the team group using their powers together to undo the damage of whatever one of them did earlier.

Admittedly, I’d find it pretty funny if this were kind of show that DIDN’T fix any of the magical chaos our “heroes” unleashed. Ya know, a zany parody series that runs on zero continuity where the whole world basically gets destroyed every single episode. But no, this idea goes in a more straightforward, heartfelt direction. I’ve got my reasons, and we’ll get into them later, but for now all that matters is that this would be a show where lessons are learned. When one of the guardians becomes worried that some creepy cult has infiltrated the school to brainwash the princess, only to discover it’s just a harmless school club, the moral is that she needs to be less suspicious of others for no reason. Conversely, when the princess sees some celebrity or activist or influencer talking about some Good Cause™ and decides to use her magic to help her, only to then discover that said influencer is actually a con artist and is abusing her help, the lesson is to not be too trusting of people you don’t know. Either way, these strangers in a strange land would be learning the hard way not to leap to conclusions about things they don’t fully understand or to make snap judgments based solely on appearances. Oh, and also that it’s pointless to try and help others because things only ever get worse, never better, so the best anyone can ever hope for in life is to leave as little of an impact on anyone else as possible. What? I think that’s a VERY important lesson to teach kids.

No, but seriously, I do think if we’re going to reverse-engineer an anime idea out of the chosen theme song, then this show would need to be less zany and more slice of life. As much as “Disconnect the Dots” comes out of the gates with an opening hook full of energy and punch and hand claps, the actual verse and chorus portions are noticeably more mellow. The natural visual accompaniment to these parts of the song would be calmer shots of the main characters wandering round town doing normal stuff and staring out into the distance while the breeze blows their hair and stuff like that. There’s still be shots of the Magical Girl transformations, or course, especially when the riff kicks back in, but that wouldn’t work for the whole song. Thus, the show following that intro would need to have more of an emphasis on the calm, normal domestic side of the girls lives. After all, that’d just make for all the more of a contrast when the magical shenanigans DO kick in and make everything crazy, right? It’d also set the precedent for a serious, heartfelt lesson-learning moment at the end of the episode, though it’d preferably be accompanied by more quirky Indie Pop rather than Full House music.

As long as I’m on the topic, let’s unpack some other possible reasons why a Japanese production company might decide to go through all the trouble of licensing this obscure American Indie tune from several decades ago. Specifically, that very title “Disconnect the Dots” could be seen as having greater significance with the character backstories suggested here. All the guardian characters are reformed villains, seeking to live down their past and break out of their former patterns of behavior. They want to overcome what they fear other people still see them as, which is to say, what they see THEMSELVES as. Conversely, the princess is living with the knowledge that her mother basically saved the whole universe, which has GOT to leave a kid feeling like she’s got some expectations to live up to. Remember, this whole “secretly live on scary ol’ Earth” thing was her idea, and it coincidentally just so happens to mean she’s about as far away from anybody who knows about her mom as possible. Yet at the same time, all of her wacky magical misadventures could be seen as her severely over-compensating, as if she thinks the only way she can live up to mom’s example is to out-do it as much as possible. Either way, these characters aren’t just humorously misunderstanding their surroundings, they’re ultimately trying to dictate a new perception of themselves and break out of patterns they fear they’re locked into. In other words, they’re hoping to disconnect the dots.

If that’s too much of a stretch for you, then here’s something a little more broad but also more mundane. The whole “fish out of water” aspect of the show takes on a different tone if you assume the fantasy kingdom of the backstory, and thus all the characters hailing from it, to have a stereotypically fairy tale aesthetic. That is, a very EUROPEAN aesthetic. Thus, we can then assume that, even out of their Magical Girl forms, our main characters would still have a conspicuously Western look to them. And if we ALSO assume that the corner of Earth where they decided to move in is Japan (and why would we ever NOT assume that), then that opens up a whole extra dimension of “look at the funny foreigners who don’t know how normal Japanese stuff works” to be read into the more magical misunderstandings. If THAT’s a part of this show’s basic framework, then using an American song with English lyrics becomes even more thematically appropriate.

And there we have it! The first installment of a whole new series! Was it long enough for ya? On the one hand, I’d like to think that the next one won’t need to be QUITE as long since I won’t have to establish all the rules all over again. But on the OTHER hand, I feel like I was kind of able to cheat by assuming that anyone reading this already knows the basics of how a Magical Girl anime works. If my idea for the next song isn’t another obvious riff on a familiar genre, and I actually have to figure out the specific nuts and bolts of how the show works, it could end up being even longer. How terrifying…