Basilisk Time

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About

Basilisk Time (Japanese: バジリスクタイム) refers to a series of videos inspired by a mashup of an African American's dance and a jackpot rendition in Pachislot machines of the TV anime for the Japanese manga Basilisk.^[1] Since the middle of 2017, it's been a popular way of expressing a sense of excitement among Japanese users on Twitter and Niconico.

Origin

On July 25th, 2016, Twitter user UchidaRi (内田り, @uch124) posted a video of the original mashup on Vine (shown below, left).^[2] The African American man dancing in this video was "Chicago's Bop King", who appeared in a YouTube video uploaded by Prince G-MO on August 21st, 2014 (below, right). UchidaRi reuploaded the video on YouTube in August 2017, though those his original uploads didn't take a part in its spreading.

The song and a very decorative purple-colored logo (shown below, left) come from the jackpot time in the Pachislot machine series, called "Basilisk Time." Since 2009, It's been a shared rendition in this series to show this logo at the beginning of the time and play the anime's opening theme song, "Koga Ninpocho" (甲賀忍法帖), by the Japanese rock band Onmyo-za^[3] (below, right) when the players are at a high rate for extending the jackpot time. That means the logo and the song's combination represent the most exciting moment when playing the gambling machines.

Spread

"Basilisk Time" had to wait to spread until the middle of 2017 when Japanese illustrator Karameru (からめる) featured it in his Twitter video posted on May 27th^[4] (shown below), which received about 6.2 million views while earning 152,000 retweets and 234,000 likes by February 2020. This animated video drew attention to a reprint of Uchida's video on YouTube^[5] and led to Niconico users sharing the copy the following month^[6], which reached 1 million views in August 2019.

[This video has been removed]

Niconico users also added the extended version (shown below, left) and Miku Miku Dance motion data replicating the dance (below, right).^[7]^[8] Then, these became fodder or a format for parody videos on Niconico to mash up the Bop King dance with various songs or put other dance videos into the Basilisk Time style. The number of those videos tagged under "Basilisk Time" raised to over 800 by December 2022.^[9]