My son is a huge fan of the Japanese anime series Digimon—like, big enough of a fan that when I said, “It’s kind of like Pokémon, right?”I got an earful about how no, it’s not at all like Pokémon. This is unusual for a kid his age: none of his friends are into Digimon at all, and, as I discovered for myself last weekend, most of Korea’s Digimon fandom is much older than him.
The event that established this fact for me was a concert I took our son to:
As you can guess from the poster, it was a performance of symphonic arrangements of songs from the Digimon series, played live against a backdrop featuring large-screen graphics from the series. The orchestra was your standard symphony orchestra, expanded to include electric guitar and bass guitar, synthesizer, and drum kit as well as saxophones. (I noticed a tenor and an alto sax in the hands of the player leaving the stage, but have to admit that at no point did I actually pick out the saxophone, not even in one very famous passage in a very famous piece… though listening back to a video posted online, I think this was an abridged version of the piece without the saxophone solos. More about that piece in a bit.)
The event was, as the poster suggests, an encore performance: the original was last year, and apparently it sold out in one minute flat, to our son’s disappointment. Therefore, when the encore show was announced, my wife balked at the prices for the tickets, but since we’d been talking about exposing him to more live music, we decided it was a good chance to get him to sit through an orchestra concert, and so she quickly snagged tickets for two. She’d originally planned to take him, but I ended up doing it, taking the train up early on Saturday.
It was my first trip to Seoul since… well, I can’t remember when was the last time I went to Seoul. (Well, unless you count the day I drove up to my friend Ahimsa’s place in Bundang, but I don’t, because we didn’t go outside of his flat.) Seoul was… hot. Like, broiling hot. We were lucky with very nice cabbies, though, and ran into mostly nice people in general—which, yes, surprises me when it comes to Seoul, based on past experience. Anyway, we spent most of the day in air conditioning, thank goodness.
When we arrived at the concert venue (which was KBS Hall), we discovered that my son was the only person in the room under twenty. Well, practically the only kid? He says that he saw one other kid at the concert, but I didn’t. What I did see was a lot of people in their twenties and thirties, most of them carrying at least a little Digimon memorabilia… swag? Er, Digimon stuff. Stuffies and little game units were the most popular bits of swag we saw.
(All of them, I assume, were highly prized items. We know from searching that Digimon stuff is pretty hard to get these days, or at least it was until this year. Even in Japan it’s been kind of hard to get, but apparently it’s the 25th anniversary of the franchise, so the dollar-store chain Daiso will be carrying some Digimon swag when my wife visits Japan this summer. As you might imagine, she plans to pick up at least something for him there while she can, assuming they still have some.)
Anyway, back to the concert. Outside a ton of fans were waiting for entry into the hall. A woman was selling what turned out to the the casing for some kind of popular Digimon game unit (one our son doesn’t have), and there was also a booth where people were selling posters, postcards, and stickers. (Our son wanted none of them.) When we finally got to the room just outside the concert hall, we found a spot where people were posting with life-sized (?) cutouts from the poster above. Yes, I have a picture of our son there. No, I’m not posting it.
Finally, the doors opened. We went in to discover that the front of the stage was heaped with Digimon stuffies. Soon after, the orchestra took the stage and performed songs from the whole franchise, including songs with a couple of apparently-famous anime-cover-song singers. (Like, guys whose whole career is based on singing Korean-language versions of anime songs.) It was a reasonably long concert: like, two hours plus a fifteen minute intermission. I don’t have any video, but you can see some video, along with lots of photos, over at this blog. Our son enjoyed the concert very much, right down to joining in as the audience roared “Let’s Go! Let’s Go!” at the appropriate moment in one of the songs. As for me, a highlight was when the orchestra performed Ravel’s Bolero… they even played it twice, once as their final encore piece. (Apparently it’s a very important song in the series, played at the very start of the story, when the characters come together as a group or something? All I know is that it’s been stuck playing on a loop in my head for days since…. hell, I woke up with it still going on a loop this morning, even!)
After the show, we headed over to Yeongdungpo, from which we were scheduled to catch a train home to Sejong City, but we managed a stop at the Aladin used bookstore location in that neighborhood before catching our train, which… that’s the only thing that could possibly have made the day even better in our son’s mind, because he got a couple of books out of the visit.)
All in all, it was a good day! Now, if only I could get Bolero out of my head…