About

Shift Change RED ZONE (Japanese : シフトチェンジでRED ZONE) refers to a style of hand drawn animations featuring the voice of the human car sound video and RED ZONE, one of the most popular soundtracks in MAD videos.

Many characters, mostly coming from Touhou Project series, have joined to this "air" street racing with the guy's intense engine sound in the videos on the Japanes video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND).

Origin

The source video of this fad which some guy was imitating an engine and gear changing sound was taken from a video sharing service outside Japan. It was reproduced to NND in May 9th, 2007, titled "Watch out the Foreigner's Driving Technique" (shown below, left).^[1] Like air guitar, this style of human engine sound videos is called "Air Street Racer" on there.

Nearly 2 years after, this funny gear change guy suddenly caught an attention by its MAD video using RED_ZONE which was the trending soundtrack for MADs in those days. This video was titled "Shift Change Red Zone", and posted to NND in February 10th, 2009 (shown below, right).^[2]

Spread

The video led to a substantial increase in popularity of the series was "Remilia Shift Change RED_ZONE".^[3] This video picturing the guy's intense expressions and actions by Remilia Scalet form Touhou Project was posted to NND in July 21st, 2009.

By the hit of this video, some of people mainly among Touhou fandom followed its style and began imitating this with many characters.

As of October 2011, though its amount isn't so many, more than a half of videos tagged with "Air Street Racer Series" on NND are hand drawn animations of this style.^[4]

Notable Examples

For more videos, check out the videos section in this entry.

Search Interest

[Not Available]

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.