When MM first started with the Alo-hello! stuff back at the Sakura/Otome DVD, I was instantly in love and at that point I didn't know much about who all the members were or anything like that, but it was so energetic, fun, and funny that I think it was a big factor in making me want to care about who they were. After that, they released what is one of the most disappointing videos I think I've ever seen, that being the "group" one just called "Morning Musume Alo-Hello!" instead of Sakura/Otome. This DVD was extremely lame, with a disgustingly low budget and very uninteresting or entertaining games. All the hilariously-written skits were gone and all that was left just felt like a slightly extended, bad episode of Hello Morning. Ironically enough, about a month before the DVD hit, they aired a "Hawaii special" episode of Hello Morning that I thought for damn sure had to be what was going to be on the DVD when it dropped a month or two later. This episode was hilarious from start to finish, lots of interaction with white people, fun games, funny interaction and jokes about members, etc. so I was sold on the DVD. Unfortunately when I actually got the DVD, I found that the footage for both the episode and the DVD were from the same trip to Hawaii and the same outings, but they just must have used the overflow footage for the DVD or something.
Anyway, after that great disappointment and a very strong disinterest in the group and its members as a whole around the time when "Morning Musume Alo-hello! 2" came out, I never even ended up watching the whole thing. All the other videos that have come out since those days (Satoda Mai, Risa, Nacchi, Mari and Tsuji?) were pretty disappointing (though Rika's solo one was great..) so I just gave up on the series as of a short while ago.
Now that the pandas have been added to the group, it restored a lot of the interest I had previously lost in the group, because those two are so damn charismatic that it becomes easy to overlook most of the other girls being as shallow as a wading pool.
And now to actually get on topic, I loved this Alo-hello!, even if it felt a bit short. JunJun gets so much screen time she may as well be the star of the whole thing, and that's more than fine with me. Its really not terribly complex to understand, even if you have limited Japanese abilities, but the H!F guys over at Hello!Online just subbed this and its up for download from their tracker if you really think you need the help.
The part with Koharu, JunJun and LinLin learning to surf was just awesome, not only because of how awesome all 3 of those girls are, but you actually saw them progress from not even having the slightest clue how to surf to actually riding a few strong waves by the end of the 10 minute segment. There's another segment of about 5-7 minutes where they just sit there and talk to JunJun and she just runs her mouth constantly and is really adorable, which makes any video instantly awesome, and she has a lot of scattered random English phrases that are really cute and actually sound pretty good. A lot of the full group parts were good too, but I'm going to watch this again tomorrow, because a lot of the other parts didn't stick with me as much cause I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention to some parts when I first watched.
Anyone else have any specific thoughts, favorite parts, etc.? I think the Sakura/Otome DVD as well as Ayaya's first Alo-hello! are down in history and will be hard to ever top, but I think this is as close as they've come since then to re-capturing the glory.
Here's some links to some screen shots, because it would take me forever to make them.
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