Viral Video Melancholia? Cure: the Haruhi Dance

So yay for serendipitous web surfing! I was searching for Death Note stuff and instead learned all about the newest anime viral video craze: the Haruhi dance! This is apparently taking over the cons in Korea and Japan, if all the horrible dances on YouTube are to be believed. (There are way too many to mention, so you will have to hunt for them yourselves. Send me alink of the best ones you find?)

Will catchy dances ala Thriller be the newest thing in the world of anime, so that even if the anime series does not last it will live on in the annals of anime pop culture? That remains to be seen, but hopefully this is the beginning of an exciting new trend of fun dances that make me laugh, which I will definitely enjoy for as long as it lasts. I would love to see TV shows in America do this, and not just in musical montage episodes (although those are fun.)

Embedded below is the original Haruhi Dance:



Here is a great blog that breaks down the dance for you, in case you decide that this is exactly what you needed for a killer convention skit. (Seriously, if someone got a group dressed up as the Host Club and danced to this, you would win my heart forever. Haruhi doing the Haruhi dance? Priceless.)

This is the blog where I first learned about it, and the guy has a great discussion about the idea of anime creators having savvy campaigns and character designs that encourage thrusting their creations into a pop culture mentality.

The same guy found a Death Note parody using the Haruhi Dance. The idea of Light dancing to such an upbeat pop song makes me squee.

Oh yeah, and don't forget in the dancing mania that there is an actual show as well: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. This blog has really pretty pics from the anime, and interesting discussions about it, like this one on the rules of the number of episodes an anime will have.

The timing of this phenomenon makes me laugh, as the whole dancing-in-cosplay-to-viral-video has been a current topic for us in the last couple of months. My sis and some friends were going to go to the Boise con as the all-female Sanzo party, and do the "Million Ways" dance, since it deals with bowing and lots of fighting and gunslinging. (Sadly, the concensus is that this dance skit will not happen after all, though the female Sanzo party's cosplay prospects are alive and well. So look for them at a Boise con near you.) Maybe they should do a Haruhi dance instead! =) Or, er, maybe not.

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Sorry for the lame title for this post; I've posted so infrequently lately that my brain is actually out of practice when it comes ot making these up. Hopefully it will be better up to speed for the next posts I do. (Not that all of my other post titles have been gems, but I feel like this one is exceptionally subpar.)

And yes, it's good to be back and posting again! I've been lazy lately, but hope to get back up to speed. I'm going to make some changes in what I post where and have new resolutions for my online stuff, and will have a post up about that soon.