The World of Golden Eggs da yo! Your life is impoverished if you haven’t seen Golden Eggs before! It’s a Japanese animation set in an American Town named ‘Turkey’s Hill’. Each episode is only 15 minutes long and there are animated adverts and parodies of different television shows included.

What’s more, all the episodes have dodgy English subtitles on them! It’s only really for entertainment value rather than as a serious learning tool, but I have to admit if it hadn’t had English subtitles, I probably wouldn’t have stopped one day to watch it in a ‘Village Vanguard’ store in Japan. What a tragedy that would have been!

Enough with the chitchat – take a look at this short collection of clips from the 2-season series! Japanese language learners will obviously get the most enjoyment out of it – but it does have rough English subtitles, so take a look ^^.

Source: Nissan Homepage

There are also interviews with Shun Oguri (小栗旬) on the website – he has starred in several dramas including the role of Rui in the drama ‘Hana Yori Dango’. He does a guest voice in Golden Eggs episode 21 as Emilo, the bedridden sick old man. Incidentally, if you click on the picture at the top of this post and look at the expanded version, Rose and Mary are talking about his appearance in the series and how much they want to meet him (旬くん）^^;.

The English and subsequently the useful Japanese (which is full of slang and natural ways of speaking you can’t get form a textbook) has also been made into a small book! Check Amazon.co.jp.

I would like to put an episode or two up to give more of a taster of the series, but they are always quickly taken down from Youtube and similar sites. Currently you can find an episode here though. But I guess it will be be removed any time soon.

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I recently came across an advertisement in Aera – a current affairs magazine in Japan while searching for information for my short dissertation I’m writing. It seems Nissan has teamed up with Plusheads (the company behind Golden Eggs) and are pushing their new line of car, the Nissan NOTE, covered with the catchphrases and bizarre characters that appear in Golden Eggs. I scanned the spread from the magazine in, so feel free to check out the Golden Eggs characters below!

I also found a couple of videos of recent adverts that have been airing in Japan to promote the car. Take a look – no subtitles though, sorry -_-”

In the second advert, Rose and Mary are building the car (a play on their usual role of cooking in the Golden Eggs series). They are talking about ‘nenpi’ (燃費) which means ‘fuel consumption’, as this car is marketed as having a low fuel consumption. For the growing amount of environmentally aware consumers, this seems to be a must nowadays. Somehow, having these two effeminate characters chat about the low fuel consumption is hilarious!

Still, I have to wonder, does this sort of advertising really work? It’s so obvious that they are using the success of Golden Eggs to push the car, but even so, I guess I want to buy it more than other cars now because I liked the series… Maybe consumers know they are being roped in, but enjoy it nonetheless? Hmm. Still, low fuel consumption *is* good… :P