でんでんガァデン

hare hare yukai will soon be a two decade old song. surely this does also mean haruhi is a two decade old anime, but I don’t need to pretend there’s a cultural footprint where there is none to inspect. haruhi after her disappearance is, appropriately, a franchise missing in action, except when it is a carted out for another kadokawa light novel showcase or cast stage event. besides the meta of it being the most common answer to queries for once popular and now forgotten shows, I don’t really see myself disagreeing with the popular assessment when the pachinko heatlamp burnt out over a decade ago and my phone is permanently on vibrate now. we should, however, keep some perspective that even expired memes like this would still make it about twenty million times more remembered than any digipaint show that is now stuck in standard definition.

assessing hare hare yukai might validate the quip without a need for any funny accounting. the choreography was probably always going to enjoy some reappraisal on tiktok, even if we weren’t sure people in the future were going to find money in performing dance covers online. to its full historical breadth, it amped up japan’s streaming video boom through bedrooms and akiba flash mobs, enough to become a feature to almost every popularly recognized kumikyoku. when many radio ranking shows at the time were doing their best to ignore anison, the single punched into a top 5 slot on the oricon charts. while you might be troubled to pull on these threads directly when confronting haruhi as a forgotten franchise, the heisei nostalgia compilations and camcorder footage from the last gasps of civic freedom that are being trudged up are very real and very everywhere, even when the coinages like エモガキ following them aren’t. when haruhi itself only manages to land in its shadow with 3DCG mocapped dance mush, I imagine whoever was sent down to the kadokawa basement to steward it must find some sick joy in twisting the knife further on its best legacy. twisting the knife is, after all, a yamakan speciality that doesn’t quit.

yamakan’s trademark, when you can separate the art from the shithead, is nailing the physicality in dance choreography. although I have seen it suggested that yamakan hates having himself labeled with a narrow legacy as the haruhi dance guy, when he has always wanted to be anime’s white knight by announcing his retirement for a fifth time, he does seem to wear it with enough pride to seize opportunity over it. by 2010, he was hosting “yamakan dance night”¹ and invoking himself as “the director of haruhi” in commercials for his first live action film, enough that it allegedly caught kadokawa’s ire. characters have of course been dancing in endings since at least urusei yatsura and tokimeki tonight, and any haruhi mook will already tell you that the decision to make haruhi dance was inspired by hare guu, but the follow-ups by yamakan in kannagi and lucky star absolutely center the modern concentration where every show must have a tiktok exploitable. unsurprisingly, yamakan has a big mouth that doesn’t shut up and has more to say on the matter, which is for once valuable for more than an eye roll: hare hare yukai’s inspiration actually goes back even further to kodocha’s ultra relax.

even though hare guu isn’t necessarily an incomplete trace for yamakan, given the episodes he directed for it and kyoani’s coupling to shin-ei, ultra relax does feel like more of a rosetta stone. this is less because it is a prototypical example of dance in a fixed perspective and more that it was clearly geared for imitation, now that I’ve collected three anecdotes, along with yamakan’s, of university clubs performing it for MADs on film or tape. dance is of course a social communication, and therefore it has always been a potential pathway to online collaboration and community, but the social functions of digital communities still require a discovery even when they may be low-hanging fruit. the surviving example with a light evangelion parody by dentsuudai maniken (電通大まにけん), UEC’s anime and manga club, I am pleased to say finds itself surrounded by plenty of hare hare yukai videos as one of the earliest uploads on nico tagged with 踊ってみた. while dance covers have of course exploded outward on the web, treating nico as the site of their collaborative cambrian explosion would not necessarily be an excessive fanfare. taking the trace back even further² to entirely different and longer-living collaborative cultures, exhibited by videos like this one, I still find useful when revisiting these brightline certainties.

the act of this video’s creation itself, and the bravery to shake your butt on gainax’s stoop, is of course a courage that deserves the majority of its kudos, but to publish without specific aim or goal and even only a nebulous sense of audience I characterize as closer to a philanthropy. the participants in these activities, in this case faffing in circles with their friends and digitizing the results for filesharing, aren’t performing a unique or virtuous homesteading. while I know they would not accept the laude I am heaping here tying them to a larger cultural moment, certain examinations, at least this close to their emergent digital mediums, currently do require a mania that can appreciate camgirls as an amateurization of media rather than a cheap smut. when we do advance the social contagion of the haruhi dance back onto CPDRC inmates and stay home calisthenics, or dance apps that have become the new propaganda, the anthropological digs that reveal these links are more valuable with the elevation. throwaway uploads to sites treated as file lockers, or casual forum discussions aired in public, are challenging to convince to participants and hosts that they are not entirely disposable artifacts without the fanfare, but even alone they are still the untapped proof for digital legacies. to the right person, the web that they are buried under is still accessible to the voyeur, and the artifacts remain available enough that there is an entertaining challenge to be had in the dig for things like scanning haruhi’s legacy, even if only to model the trash we think is the coolest. much of the freedom left to find in the web, I have found, is in excavating this trash: wiser wielders of this power may use it to navigate truth in digital goon hazes, rather than spend their time watching haruhi dances, but the paths to both walk along similar trails.

any number of tours over personalities or their popular artifacts will tell you that it is generally presumptive to suggest your own cultural longevity, with very few exceptions. yamakan, as late as 2012, has naturally preferred to boast that nothing may ever surpass the haruhi dance, if you can forget that most of the choreography was already borrowed. given that he has been effectively blacklisted and shamed out of the industry, for reasons too perverse and sprawling to enumerate here, I instead counter that yamakan will now never surpass anything other than an ability to dig a deeper hole for himself. undoubtedly, the conditions for media today do make it difficult to imagine an equivalent dance could seep as fully into our cultural watershed, but to suggest you sit on top of the last mountain is both a special arrogance and a disrespect for what has come before and will come after you. yamakan’s most famous flame out, at this point, fully overrides his own kemoko deluxe shame. he lacked a crystal ball to see into a rotoscoping future that has already made one close brush against his legacy, or that dimension W would get a sweet OVA variant, or that the akiba mecca for dance assemblies would not last forever. perhaps, we will need a little more time for the right artifact to find its supplementing trash, so that it can be raised up to his level.