As they’re covering soul dance when Shoon and Takada are shown for the location segment they’re dressed up in afros, sunglasses and dark skin. Though you can tell they only put the make-up on their faces as their necks are noticeably a different shade.
They go to a dance studio and meet a soul dance master. They change clothes and clean up for the actual dance lesson. Shoon keeps saying it’s difficult, probably because soul dance is more than just learning dance steps, but Takada doesn’t seem to do much better.
They then do a segment called It’s Shorn and Sho’s Showtime. I can’t help but wonder if misspelling Shoon’s name was intentional or not, though seeing as Sho’s name was correct I’m thinking it was definitely a mistake. But both boy’s come into the classroom cosplaying 70’s dancers and show off what they have learned. Then the whole group gets to learn a soul dance move before moving on.
After introducing a few more dances for different eras of the 20th century Inohara asks the boys to talk about them. During this talk Totsu brings up Michael Jackson’s famous moonwalk and is asked to demonstrate it for everyone. After that Fujigaya brings up M.C. Hammer, which for me brings back some nostalgia as he was big when I was a kid, but as Fujigaya and Totsu seem to remember him I guess he was big in Japan during that time too.
The end clip of course is Shoon and Sho doing their soul dance routine.
Authors Notes 11/02/18 It's hard to look back and see just how ignorant you were in the past. I had quite the sheltered life so blackface was not even a term I had heard until much later in my life. And living in mostly white communities there was very little outside of that culture I even knew of if it was not shown on a TV program I watched when I younger. Hence why I was sleeping on just how bad this was and come off so clueless when pointing it out.
Blackface without a doubt is hurtful and even though the program was trying to link it all to something that could be seen as a positive like "soul dance" it is still pushing a stereotype for black people. Instead of treating them like actual people with a great diversity of likes and dislikes, cultures and sub-cultures, etc, that any group of people lumped together by something as arbitrary as skin color can be it equates being black with soul music. So while the production staff probably did not mean to do so it still happened and should not be condoned.
I am keeping this though as with all the other posts it is a reminder of just how much people can change. And I feel much better about it now that I have this note attached to point out how the make up in this episode is not okay.
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