BoingBoing reader Gavin says,
I'm in Japan right now (visiting for work) and have become obessed (along with the rest of this country) with these two cute dancing/singing girls who are spokespeople for a cod roe noodle company.
Take a look at their song/dance number and you'll see what I mean. I actually got them performing it live on TV yesterday morning and almost died from poppy cute awesomeness.
Link. They're both cute and disturbing, like Shirley Temple meets the Coneheads.
Reader comment:Tamyu says,
Kewpie is a company that sells sauces – they began with mayonnaise and eventually expanded into other foods, including pasta sauces. Their company character is a Kewpie doll – hence the Kewpie faces on the roe sacks. The girls aren`t exactly spokespeople – they`re the "group" that performed the original song, which was only intended to be a short commercial song. It caught on and Kewpie was bombarded with people wanting the cd, etc. They FINALLY got around to releasing it – at this point it`s no longer an advertisement, but more like fan service.
I think a lot of the appeal is that the song is addictive without being overly cheerful. It has a sort of dark melody to it, which really fit with the advancing lines of tarako. The ad campaign was based on emphasizing the sheer amount of cod roe (tarako) in the sauce.
We`ve been really big fans of the whole Tarako movement ever since the first commercial – it`s the ring for our cell phones, and even our normal home phone. The sauce itself is great too.
(I live in Japan with my family, and am fluent in Japanese.)
