Masaru-san Opening Parodies

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About

Masaru-san Opening Parodies (Japanese: マサルさんOP再現MAD) refer to a series of parody video remixes for the opening credit movie in a TV anime for a Japanese manga Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoiyo! Masaru-san (セクシーコマンドー外伝すごいよ!!マサルさん) written by Kyosuke Usuta.^[1] It has been a challenging subject for amateur illustrators/animators on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) since 2007.

Origin

The TV anime series for Masaru-san was a 10-minute program in a weekday late night variety show and aired 48 episodes between January and March in 1998. The opening credit movie is well-known among anime otakus for its hilariously dynamic anime movements inspired by the drawing style of Fujio Akatsuka^[2] and many parodies/homages to other anime titles which are the works of the director for this anime Akitaro Daichi^[3] or his favorite old titles such as Cyborg 009, Gutsy Frog, Ken the Wolf Boy, Star of the Giants, etc… And the theme song "Romance" was sung by a Japanese rock band PENICILLIN.^[4]

Spread

The earliest opening parody video for this anime was "Sugoiyo Multi-san" created by the manga & animation circle in The University of Electro-Communications^[5] (電通大まにけん) in 1998 (shown below, left). This video features characters from a Japanese visual novel To Heart^[6] which is one of the representative adult games in 1990s Japanese Otaku culture. Meanwhile, it grabbed the spotlight on NND in 2007, where various kind of parody video creations were booming by the evolution of drawing and movie editing applications. The earliest hit video in this era was a hand-drawn animated parody video featuring Yu-Gi-Oh!, which was posted on July 1st, 2007 (shown below, right).

Due to its difficulty, the amount of videos in this series isn't so many. But the videos have been constantly created by highly motivated users and many of them have been watched over hundreds of thousands of times.^[7]