About

Death-zawa Tomozo (Japanese: デス沢友蔵) refers to a series of MAD videos featuring a scene taken from the English-dub version of Japanese TV anime Chibi Maruko Chan.^[1] Inspired by a Twitter post by an out of context account, dozens of parodies and remixes were uploaded to niconico Douga (niconico) and YouTube between May and June of 2019.

Origin

On May 21st, 2019, Twitter account No Context Chibi Maruko-chan (@no_maruko)^[2] posted a short video clip where Tomozo Sakura, the grandfather of the protagonist Maruko, is jumping down off from the stage at Kiyomizu-dera temple^[3], while shouting "This is the way a man should die!". The scene, taken from the 808th episode "Maruko Goes to A Sushi Restaurant" aired in May 2011, depicts the idiom "to jump off the Stage of Kiyomozu", which is the Japanese equivalent of "to take the plunge" in English, and expresses Tomozo's feeling when he allowed his granddaughter ordering an extravagant sushi.

Spread

Around the end of that month, this post became to get an attention among some of Japanese Twitter users because it was quite odd for them, who couldn't be heard nor understand English, that the nationwidely popular Japanese character was shouting in the foreign language at the well-known sight in their country. People gave Tomozo in this scene a nickname "Death-zawa Tomozo" (デス沢友蔵), which comes from a misheard phrase of his utterance "Death-zawa ya Pancetta" (ですざわやぱんちぇったー), and soon set him for a subject for parody on the video-sharing sites. To Be Continued parody by Twitter user @kiji0621__ (shown below, left)^[4] and MAD video using "Coo's theme" from Kirby's Dream Land 2 by user Kuregashira (くれがしら) (shown below, right) were the earliest instances in this video remix series.

Following on these remixes, more than 100 videos had been uploaded to YouTube^[5] and Niconico^[6] within its first month, and more than half of those videos had the same title "ですざわやぱんちぇったー" and the same thumbnail (shown below) because they also copied the earliest one's format just for fun.

Various Examples

Search Interest

[Not Available]

External References