Quick post with a fun fact that I just randomly discovered: the video for the hit song "Roam" by the B-52s has sumo menko in it.
I absolutely love that song and remember it getting heavy airplay when I was a teenager in the early 1990s. I hadn't seen the video in decades and was just watching it when I noticed a bunch of sumo menko in the background which I thought was really neat. They appear really prominently from 2:39 in the video when 8 of them are in a kind of artistic background arrangement while Fred Schneider dances in front of them. They also appear a bit later in the video among a bunch of other random stuff.
I'm not sure who the wrestlers are that are depicted, maybe SumoMenkoMan might be able to identify them?
Even if you aren't a sumo fan, its worth checking it out because you can never get enough of Roam.
Wow. Nice catch. Heard the song on the radio a few times this year, but haven't seen that video in years. If SumoMenkoMan can't identify them... you're going to be hard pressed to find someone who can.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I hear it all the time too but I had no memory of the video until the other day and was kind of surprised by it!
DeleteHa, it has been forever since I’ve heard that song and probably the first, and last, time sumo menko have been featured in a music video. Those images are circular crops of larger cards. You can see Oikawa’s name is cut off. I’ve seen the images before but since I don’t have my collection with me here in Germany, I can’t pinpoint the exact set they come from. Looks like from around 1957 or 1958. So random, I’m still laughing! Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I kind of wondered if they had been cropped since I noticed that name cut off too. I thought that tracking them down might be an interesting side project for you (my knowledge of sumo menko is limited so I don't even know where to start!)
DeleteI'm pretty sure they are from the BC-series of menko from the second half of the 1950s. It wouldn't take long to thumb through the sets and find the images.
DeleteNice detective work!!
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