If you caught the new Adam Curtis BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, you may have noticed the lovely opening theme. “Baby Love Child” is from Japan’s Pizzicato Five. I thought it was a weird choice, although I love the song. In 1994 I made a music video for “Baby Love Child.”  The video mostly consists of already existing footage of Maki Nomiya, P5’s beautiful lead singer, taken from outtakes from other shoots and bits of a documentary. I shot the in-studio lip-sync, and once back in LA, I did the (primitive) art and the animated Nam June Paik-wanna be segments where I was working at the time. The budget was pretty much a free trip to Tokyo and a $1000. I haven’t seen this in years but I think it came out pretty good. If you want to hear the song I recorded with Pizzicato Five in Japan, I played it in one of the Dangerous Minds Radio Hour shows.
 

 
When I was working in Toyko in 1994, not unsurprisingly, I had a really hard time adjusting to the change in time zones. I’d wake up like a pinball machine at 3AM and stay up. There wasn’t much on TV at night in Japan then, but each morning at 7:30AM an absolutely amazing kids show came on that blew my doors off each time I watched it. Not that I had even the slightest idea of what was going on, of course, but it looked incredible. Curiously there was a character who was a talking turd...

Ugo Ugo Lhuga was a big-budget childrens program that adults liked too, similar to things like Do Not Adjust Your Set, Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Yo Gabba Gabba. Sometimes pop acts like Shonen Knife or Pizzicato 5 appeared on the show. It was a mix of live action and frenetic computer animation, most of it done on a Commodore Amiga. The show was a victim of the economy and Japan’s “lost decade” recession, but the show lives on on YouTube and DVD.