Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Fun Fact: The B-52s video for Roam has Sumo Menko in it!


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.



6 comments:

  1. 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.

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    1. Yeah, 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!

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  2. Ha, 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!

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    1. Yeah, 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!)

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    2. I'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.

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