One of my big reasons for creating this Anime/Music Connection world was because it made an excellent vehicle for a series of posts that I’ve toyed with doing for about half a year or so. This series is called Personal Themes, and it’s about the music that I’ve come to associate with particular anime and manga titles or just specific anime/manga characters. I think many of us all probably do that in some way or another. We’ll hear a certain song on the radio and it might remind us of a scene from the major episode of an anime series, like the death of an important character. So I wanted to do a series of posts that reveals the connections that I make with anime and certain types of music, mainly to try and show others a little bit of how my mind works. For this first post, I’ve decided to cover something a little simple, how I see the music of the band, Styx as the soundtrack to the original Yu-Gi-Oh! saga.
I should probably take this moment to warn everyone that this post will contain spoilers for the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Anyway who’s not familiar with the show may want to stop reading now.
The large part of the reason why I strongly associate the music of Styx with the original Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably because of a friend of mine in high school. As I recall, he was the person who really exposed me to Styx, or at least made me aware of the band’s existence. A couple of times he even talked about the time he went to one of their concerts and they did an encore performance of their hit, Come Sail Away. My friend was also really into the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime when it came out, perhaps more so than I ever was. Of course I don’t think that my personal connection between Yu-Gi-Oh! and the music of Styx really crystalized until after the very first time I read Volume 1 of the original manga version of the series. It was a rainy afternoon in high school, and I and another friend of mine were at this college campus (where we were taking special graphic arts classes) waiting for our bus to get there. I can’t precisely describe it in words, but there was just something about the tone of the whole experience of the afternoon as well as the manga itself that just seemed to totally match up with the music of Styx. In fact the manga matched up to the music of a particular album, the Paradise Theater album.
I’ve always sort of felt like the album’s title song, which we’ve just seen in the above video, could be an opening theme for the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series. It probably couldn’t be the opening for the whole series, but I feel like it could at least fit the “Season Zero” anime episodes and the Duelist Kingdom arc. I don’t know exactly how the animation for the opening would go, but when the song gets to the verse that starts with, “There’s people putting us down,” they could show images of Pegasus, maybe Kaiba, and most of the various minor villains that show up during the story arc in question.
Of course that’s not the only song from the Paradise Theater album that I feel matches up with the original Yu-Gi-Oh!.
After reading the first seven volumes of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, the above song sort of reminded me of all the scenes in those first seven volumes where Yugi and his friends would often just hang out at the end of the school day; hitting the arcade or just getting a bite to eat at a burger joint. Very often it would be those scenes that would lead to Yugi and the gang stumbling into trouble, like that chapter of the manga where an escaped convict holds Tea/Anzu hostage after Yugi and Joey/Jonouchi find out that she’s working there as a waitress. It’s a happy coincidence that a while back I found a scan on Minitokyo of a scene that to me really matched up the scenes in the above video where the members of Styx are in a bar. I almost immediately used that scan to make an iPhone wallpaper (which can be seen by clicking here) that references the song.
In the end, it’s our own minds that make musical connections like this to an anime series or a character. The actual meaning of the song may be different from our own interpretation and the connections we make, but often it only takes one little detail of the song, one word, that can make these connections solid. This next song is an example of what I’m talking about.
The above song has a line that goes, “Even pharaohs turn to sand,” and that was all that my mind really needed to clinch my association with the music of Styx to the original Yu-Gi-Oh!. I mean the story is partly about the spirit of a nameless pharaoh. The song itself isn’t about pharaohs or ancient Egypt, but that one phrase was all that my mind needed to truly make the connection.
There are also songs by the band, Styx that I associate with specific characters. I see this next one as the theme song to Yugi’s best friend in the series, Joey Wheeler (Katsuya Jonouchi).
This connection is probably due to a bit of misinterpretation on my part. When I first heard the song, I thought it was about gambling. And as Joey used a lot of gambling cards in his deck, the song kind of just stuck. I’ve even made two versions of a wallpaper of Joey featuring that song (the more recent version of the wallpaper can be seen by clicking here). One of my favorite duels of the Duelist Kingdom arc is the duel between Joey and Bandit Keith. More than once when I’ve been able to while reading that duel in the original manga is cue up the above song on my iPod or on the computer. I’ve found that if I start the song at the right time, it synchs up almost perfectly with that duel. The end of that duel when Joey delivers the final blow to Bandit Keith is especially impactful when it synchs up with the start of the instrumental part of the song that has the saxophone playing.
I want to make it clear that it’s not just the songs from the Paradise Theater album that I associate with Yu-Gi-Oh!. This next song from Styx’s Grand Illusion album could easily be a theme song for Yami Yugi/Pharaoh Atem.
I don’t think there’s a lot of explanation for this song choice needed here. The song is about a man trying to find himself, and for a large part of the series Atem is a man with no past who’s trying to find out who he is.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, but before we end it I’d like to highlight another Styx song that I think would fit a major moment of the Yu-Gi-Oh! story.
If memory serves, the band did this song as a tribute to their original drummer, who died sometime during the nineties. A while ago though, it hit me that the song could fit the moment towards the very end of the series where Yugi defeats Atem in a duel. It’s the moment where Yugi and the rest of the gang have to say goodbye to a dear friend before he crosses into the afterlife.
I think that’ll pretty much cover it for this post. I mean I could go on about other songs by the band Styx and how I connect them to the original Yu-Gi-Oh! saga, but I think these six songs are enough for the time being. Maybe I’ll do a part two and maybe even a part three to this post later on. In any case, I hope that everyone found this post interesting. Until next time, I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this post.
