The Elements Song (Tom Lehrer tune), Super Cute Japanese Version
Remember that fantastic iPad app, The Elements, blogged here around the time of the iPad's US launch? And that cute little easter egg within the app: an animated rendition of Tom Lehrer's "The Elements Song?" Here's a new version to accompany the new Japanese edition of the Elements App, sung by two cute girls who dig science. I love it.
Theodore Gray, the guy behind all of it, explains:
I have a cousin, Thomas Howard Lichtenstein, who has lived in Osaka for the past 20 years making a living as a lounge singer at night and composer during the day. This turned out to be a remarkably useful fact when I decided that, based on the huge success of The Elements for iPad in Japan, I really wanted to record a translation into Japanese of Tom Lehrer's elements song. (The entire rest of the ebook had been translated into Japanese: The only things left in English were the song and the spoken element names.)More at periodictable.com.I asked my cousin if he could make it sound like a nauseatingly cute Japanese pop song. My exact words were "make me think of cats with big eyes". Which I think he has clearly achieved.
I had planned to locate and hire some kind of B-list J-Pop idol to sing it, but he suggested his daughters give it a try, and they did a fantastic job. So the singers are in fact my twin 13-year-old, half-Japanese first cousins once removed. So there you have it, my contribution to increasing the world's supply of WTF, one song at a time.
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