Ask John: Who Started the Anime Opening Theme Song Tradition?

Question:
Which was the first vocal theme song ever created for or used for an opening or an ending. I heard or read somewhere that the 1963 Tetsuwan Atom anime didn’t originally have a vocal theme song until Japanese staff of the series watched the English version, which had a vocal theme song for the opening, that they decided to create one for the Japanese version (styled after the American one) and that song has since been used in all Tetsuwan Atom anime. If that is true, was this the first one or was it another one? Because if this was the first and what I vaguely remember is true, that would technically mean that the vocal opening/ending practice in anime is an American creation that was taken and modified by the Japanese for all anime created after Astro Boy, and then it developed into an industry of its own in Japan that has no equal in Western cartoons outside of cinema, with singles used to promote an anime or an artist.

Answer:
The reality of the origins and popularization of the anime theme song is a bit of a tangled web which requires multiple perspectives to accurately sort out. I can’t guarantee that I’ve gotten it all straightened out, but I’m pretty confident that my research is correct.

Japan’s first weekly anime television series was Tetsuwan Atom, which premiered on the Fuji TV network on January 1, 1963. The series opened with an instrumental anthem composed by Tatsuo Takai. Shortly after the series premiered, a representative of American television network NBC saw an episode of the show broadcast on Japanese television and encouraged NBC to purchase the American broadcast rights for the program. NBC hired Fred Ladd to attempt an American localization of Tetsuwan Atom. Ladd was hired because he was a young animator, screenwriter, and director experienced in working on children’s programming including 1958’s The Space Explorers and 1961’s The Underseas Explorers. In his 2008 book Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon, Ladd explains:

Tetsuan Atom shows arriving from Tokyo opened with an orchestral version of the now-familiar march music. That’s the way the series was broadcast in Japan. But I grew up in America in an era when every kids show on radio and on early television opened with a theme song. Not to do so would have been unthinkable! …I recommended to NBC’s Jim Dodd that we do the same with Astro Boy. We could keep the same catchy melody – just add words. Dodd agreed and commissioned his friend Don Rockwell to write lyrics to the original theme composed by Tatsuo Takai in Tokyo… When Osamu Tezuka, on a visit to New York, first saw our English version, he was stunned – literally, stunned – to hear each program open not with the orchestral version of Takai’s theme, but with music and lyrics! He had not expected or even contemplated such a thing. He immediately ordered that Japanese lyrics be written to Takai’s melody and had all Tetsuan Atom shows open with it. (24)

Ladd continues, “That was a switch: instead of the English version following the Japanese lead, the Japanese version in this case followed the American lead!” (24). However, Tetsuwan Atom episode 31, the first episode to feature a vocal opening theme performed by the Kamitakada Shounen Gasshoudan children’s choir, aired on Japanese television on July 30, 1963, more than a month before Astro Boy premiered on American television on September 7, 1963. Ironically, Japanese viewership ratings for the first thirty episodes of Tetsuwan Atom ranged from a low of 21.6% for episode 21 to a high of 35.1% for episode 11. But the Japanese viewership rating for the first episode with a vocal opening theme dropped precipitously down to 16.9%.

Japan’s second hand-drawn weekly television anime series was the late-night series Sennin Buraku, which premiered on September 4, 1963, and did not have an opening theme song at all. The third weekly television anime series to premiere in Japan was Tetsujin 28-gou, which premiered on October 20, 1963, and featured a vocal opening theme by Duke Aces from its debut episode onward.

Considering that children’s television animation originated in the United States, arguably the first children’s cartoon to feature a vocal opening theme was Adventures of Pow Wow, which premiered on the WNBT-TV network in New York on January 30, 1949.

But Japan has an ancient history of appropriating and improving foreign ideas and technology ranging from written ideograms to microprocessors. Osamu Tezuka may have gotten the idea for a lyrical anime opening theme song from American producer Fred Ladd, but Tezuka released his vocal Astro Boy theme to the public before Ladd premiered NBC’s own original version. Furthermore, while American children’s programming like The Mickey Mouse Club popularized its theme song in 1955, it was Japanese producers who realized that theme songs could become tremendously marketable commodities.

Citation:
Ladd, Fred, and Harvey Deneroff. Astro Boy and Anime come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon. McFarland & Co, 2008.