Kick, punch, snip, trim, slurp, suck, rock and jive with this tribute to Parappa and Lammy.
Now put these kids to sleep will ya
SHOW NOTES
0:00:00 – Opening (Parappa the Rapper)
0:08:19 – Chop Chop Master Onion (Parappa the Rapper)
0:10:46 – Instructor Mooselini (Parappa the Rapper)
0:12:49 – Prince Fleaswallow (Parappa the Rapper)
0:22:42 – Cheap Cheap Chicken (Parappa the Rapper)
0:24:59 – All Master Rap (Parappa the Rapper)
0:27:51 – Live with King Kong Mushi (Parappa the Rapper)
0:36:28 – Fire Fire (UmJammer Lammy)
0:39:25 – Baby Baby (UmJammer Lammy)
0:41:48 – Fright Flight (UmJammer Lammy)
0:50:00 – Power Off, Power On (UmJammer Lammy)
0:52:40 – Taste of Teriyaki (UmJammer Lammy)
1:01:09 – Hair Scare (Parappa 2)
1:04:00 – Noodles Cant Be Beat (Parappa 2)
1:12:14 – No Cutting Corners (UmJammer Lammy)
I have nothing to say because I haven’t listened to the episode yet! But it feels good to be first. Gotta believe!
This makes me reminisce about ‘CanGate’! Oh, the memories….
I don’t remember many of the songs from any of the games but the first Parappa, even though I did everything in all three. I thought I hadn’t even played Parappa 2 until the talk about everything turning to noodles, then I remembered. I remember the baby and wood chopping parts of Lammy really sucking, too.
Parappa was neat for people to watch other people play, but if you didn’t know where each button was, you couldn’t play it, so it wasn’t much fun for non-gamers.
I think I’ll stick my PS1 copy of Parappa into my PS3 and play a bit, since I don’t have anything to play on my PS4 now that I’m done with AC4, and the PS4 won’t play the old games.
Brelston and friends,
Wow. The discovery of CanGate is definitely a find. More obvious to me is that the Prince Fleaswallow track blatantly rips off Joe Cocker’s “Alright”. You can hear it in the first 8 seconds; see below.
Fleaswallow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtmK7swLi2U
Cocker:
I had a bunch of stuff I was going to say here about PaRappa (how the rap masters are likenesses of real people, like Shaggy or Queen Latifah), but I chickened out on that. I liked how you had the “best” versions of the songs, but you never really talked about what would happen if you started doing poorly, with little quacks and honks in the music, and the on-screen action would get dull or sleepy. I expected at least a mention of U RAPPIN GOOD somewhere!
I also wanted to add that on the PSP version of PaRappa you could download remix versions of all the songs for free. You may still be able to! I liked those because somehow those were the only versions I could ever get to the freestyle mode. It’s cool to hear those versions of the songs too. They’re really good. Go look for them!
On Lammy I could get to freestyle on nearly all of the stages with practice. I liked how it made more musical “sense” to freestyle with the guitar versus word gibberish with PaRappa.
Good show!
…..That the Parappa songs ripped off other music probably shouldn’t be a surprise. It is hip-hop after all. I’m just sayin’.
Is the final stage track for um jammer No Cutting Corners of Got to Move?
One of my favorite video game tracks ever is this remix of Romantic Love some beautiful person on the Internet made. I’ll jam to that any day of the week. Highly tempted to grab PaRappa and Um Jammer Lammy from PSN now, possible input lag or not. Thanks for the great show as always, guys!
Also, any chance we’ll see the Dreamcast rhythm games get their own show?
I tried playing Parappa from the PS1 disc on my PS3, and the lag does seem to make it hard to play. I already had crowns for all the levels, so it let me freestyle, but getting my rhythm the right amount off so the game scored me properly was tough. And when I switched off smoothing for the graphics it looks incredibly blocky. Who’d have thought better TVs would make things worse?
NEVER USE JOE CHIN’S CHAINS FOR THEMMMM!!!! I’ve been waiting for a Parappa/Um Jammer Lammy episode 🙂
Such a quotable series. “Dojo, casino, it’s all in the mind.” “CASINO HERE, CASINO THERE, CASINO IN MY HAIR!”
Memories of playing Parappa the Rapper at a friend’s place and laughing myself to death during Instructor Mooselini’s level. “Step ohn teh GAAAASSS???” I really love this series. Kind of odd that I’ve never owned a copy of the original Parappa.
It is pretty crazy how ingrained Parappa became in videogame-related pop culture. Remember when Robot Chicken parodied it? That was pretty golden.
Parappa 2 really wasn’t that bad. I mean, with tracks like Romantic Love, you can tell they were stretching it when it came to rhyming, like “Tamanegi flavor, wish I was a player, I’m a tax payer, need a good lawyer!” Even then, I really enjoyed a bunch of the raps, with the first level, “Toasty Buns” being my favorite. “BIG” is a really awesome one too, where Parappa and the bug rapper keep growing bigger and smaller as a result of the remote control zapper. There’s also a fun chiptuney remix that they rap to in one level.
While the Um Jammer Lammy censorship you guys mentioned was pretty embarrassing, it actually went farther than that. In “I Am A Master And You!” the European/Japanese version (and the North American demo) preserved the line “So you can play in hell, you come far” but it was changed to “So you can play in an island, you come far” for the North American release. Obviously meant as a foreshadowing for the whole hell/island portion. Another bit of censorship is in “Power Off! Power On!” where the European/Japanese line “Choppin’ trees down for the fun” was altered to “Knowin’ that we’re here for the fun.” I guess it was to avoid pissing off tree huggers. I dunno.
And in Parappa the Rapper 2, a line in “Toasty Buns” that goes “Burgers, burgers it’s all we have in mind! We cook the best, tastes better in wine” was censored to “Burgers, burgers it’s all we have in mind! We cook the best, you better get in line!” *face-palm*
I recall playing the PSP version of Parappa the Rapper years ago and hating how off the timing and input lag felt…Um Jammer Lammy is best played on a PS1 or PS2 hooked up to a CRT, or on Vita. I’ve unfortunately had nothing but bad luck trying to play it on a PS3 or HDTV. Parappa the Rapper 2 on the other hand plays just fine on a backwards compatible PS3.
Still waiting on a Parappa the Rapper 3. Would be perfect as a digital game for PS4 or Vita.
While I get why people hate censorship, sometimes I really think that the censored lyrics sound better than their originals. For instance, who cooks burgers in wine?
The rap in the entirety of the Parappas is uneven; I think that’s part of the charm.
Great epsiode, love this music so much. UmJammer Lammy is so under rated, I like it just as much as Parapa but I prefer rock to Hip Hop so that makes sense.
I actually used the chop chop master onion song in a kids lesson in Japan and they loved it. Usually get to do a Parapa song with the actions every couple of weeks because they love it so much
I can sympathize with anti-censorship arguments but here I think it’s a little unfounded. Pretty much every gaming journalist I’ve ever heard/read decries any sort of censorship in gaming. The problem in this instance is that Lammy is rated E for everyone, not just teenage-and-up male gamers who pride themselves in not being offended or ashamed of anything. Given that a large percentage of people in this country have some religious affiliation, and a cartoony game with an E rating is bound to attract young children, it seems to me only prudent to alter content that could potentially be deemed offensive to the parents of small kids that might play the game(who themselves aren’t yet old enough to contextualize a game where the main character dies and goes to hell to fight their doppelganger). Now, if the game had been rated E10(although I don’t think the classification existed at that point), they would have likely made no changes and we wouldn’t be talking about it today.
I hope I’m not offending your sensibilities; it’s just that when you sarcastically remark that censorship of this sort is enacted because American audiences aren’t mature enough to process these kinds of themes, I think you’re subconsciously assuming that the American audience is entirely comprised of people/kids who are at least as old as you were when you encountered whatever game it is that you’re talking about……and that’s not the case at all.
But even Disney movies feature death in some form, and those are watched by kids worldwide. And I think American audiences CAN deal with these sort of themes, it’s just that there’s a vocal minority that likes to decry things like death and “hell” in children’s media, so if anything that spurned SCEA into censoring it for American audiences. If the European and Japanese branches of Sony Computer Entertainment thought it was okay, then why not SCEA?
Oh, you’re right, I’m sure SCEA preemptively censored the game to avoid controversy. I can’t blame them. Europe is a post-modern, post Christian society and Japan has never been Christian. The US is definitely following Europe’s cultural shift but there is still a sizable chunk of the economic base here that would find that kind of content inappropriate for little kids. There’s no great tragedy here; they weren’t burning books, they were just trying to avoid an unnecessary headache.
Your mention of Disney reminded me that at about that time Disney came out with Hercules, which had Hades as a main character. And Don Bluth put out Anastasia(the distributor escapes my memory at the moment), which involved a dead heretic monk trying to kill the Tsar’s long lost daughter. Go figure.
Huzzah! VGMpire is back!
To be honest, the music in all of these 3 games isn’t really my cup of tea, but it was an interesting listen nonetheless.
Really dug the episode, Brett!
Now all we need is some Gitaroo-Man love!
[…] VGMpire Episode 61 – UmRapper Palammy […]
I can’t fathom how many hours I spent playing Parappa on the Playstation demo disc alone. It’s unique in so many ways, but I mostly remember struggling to wrap my head around a rhythm game haha. Shooters, platformers, RPGs, I was well versed in so many genres and Parappa added a whole new language to my video game vernacular. UmJammer Lammy and Gitaroo Man continued my rhythm love, but it all started with Parappa.
Very fun episode! Man, I didn’t play a lot of Parappa, but it still all came flooding back to me as I listened. Sadly, I totally missed UmJammer Lammy. The music is fantastic, and the whole notion that there was a “Second Quest” in the game is a lost gem to be sure. Sure would be nice to have these characters return, and I’m not even much of a Sony person.