Yo-Kai Exercise Number One

About

"Yo-Kai Exercise Number One" (Japanese: ようかい体操第一, Yōkai Taisō Dai-Ichi) is the ending theme song for the TV anime adaptation of the Japanese role-playing video game Yo-Kai Watch^[1] developed by LEVEL 5. Since the premiere of the TV series in January 2014, the song has been a popular subject for singing and dancing covers, as well as MAD videos on Nico Nico Douga (NND).

Origin

The song "Yo-kai Exercise Number One" was originally produced for a promotional video for Yo-Kai Watch (shown below, left), released for Nintendo 3DS on July 11th, 2013, and subsequently featured as the ending theme for the first 24 episodes of the TV adaptation, which premiered on January 8th, 2014. Sung by the Japanese idol group Dream 5 (shown below, right),^[2] the tune features simple melody lines and easy-to-follow dance routines as the franchise mainly targeted the youth demographic.

Spread

Throughout the latter half of 2013 and the following year, the video game and the anime series became a sensation among the Japanese youths, and in the summer of 2014, the song became a popular source material for tributes and parodies on NND, with much of its substantial increase in popularity owed to two exceptionally remarkable videos uploaded in mid-August: On August 12th, Manako (まなこ), famous NND dancer and ex-member of AVEX-supported Japanese female dance group DANCEROID^[4], uploaded a cute dancing cover^[3] to both NND and YouTube (shown below, left). On August 16th, the first MAD remix video featuring footage from Z-Kai Commercial titled "Z-Kai Watch" was posted (shown below, right). Each video earned between 500,000 to a million views within its first month and prompted an estimate of over 1000 tributes and parody videos^[5] in the following month.

Various Examples

Dancing Covers

MAD Videos

Search Interest

External References

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