Kuwata Keisuke takes on Giant Baba! 桑田佳祐 vs. ジャイアント馬場 plus ダーリン

Keeping with his theme of making commercials with dead people celebrities who have passed on for Wonda Coffee here is Kuwata Keisuke's latest CM, this time starring puroresu legend Shohei "Giant" Baba:



This follows Kuwata's previous Wonda commercials with actor Hitoshi Ueki and director Akira Kurosawa.

As a bonus, here is Kuwata's latest (solo) single, ダーリン (thanks to youtube user hijiricom):

A Series of Interesting CMs: 牛乳に相談だ The Japan Dairy Council

牛乳に相談だ (ぎゅうにゅうにそうだんだ/gyuunyuu ni soudanda/Can someone give me a reasonable sounding translation of this?) is a campaign by the Japan Dairy Council (中央酪農会議) aimed at getting young people in Japan to drink milk again. Someone might want to tell them about their main page title: Welcow to 日本の酪農 -社団法人中央酪農会議-.
Anyway, there have been a series of commercials:
Milk enables student to take on his chalk wielding teacher:

(thanks to Youtube user gooooopon)

Milk helps student battle lion and save the girl/Milk makes student so popular she is caught in a flood of love letters/the chalk one again:

(thanks to Youtube user countsei)

Milk makes mom and daughter...um...

(thanks to Youtube user ajibee)

Which is your favorite?
(Note: There are a couple of other videos (one about basketball and one about synchronized swimming) that I haven't found yet.)

You have to admit that these are much more interesting than the milk commercials I had to watch when I was growing up:

(thanks to Youtube user panbiscuit)

Although possibly not as interesting as this:

(thanks to youtube user nerrad712).

Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs! Tsunami! Chestnut! 2007! ネイサンズ国際ホットドッグ 2007

Tsunami down! Tsunami down!
So despite the injured jaw the Tsunami broke the World Record of 59.5 hot dogs with 63 but unfortunately Joey Chestnut had just a bit more in the tank and finished with 66, breaking Kobayashi's streak of 6 championships and 7 in a row by Japanese contestants.
Joey "Jaws" Chestnut: 66
Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi: 63
Patrick Bertoletti: 49
There seems to be a bit of controversy with the results:
1) Apparently Kobayashi had a "reversal of fortune" towards the very end and some are saying he should be dqed but much like NBA Superstars and traveling he's not being called on it.
2) EatFeats says they're not sure where the extra 3 dogs came from for Joey because the final numbers were 63 Chestnut, 63 Kobayashi.
Also, I'm sorry but there seems to be a slight theme of racism towards Kobayashi (look at the Gothamist comments or here for examples). Plus apparently the ESPN commentators were rolling out Japanese stereotypes during the broadcast. Stay classy America.
Ah well, Kobayashi will be still be in America for some sort of Pizza Hut eating contest.

EatFeats, a blog dedicated to competitive eating, has a liveblog of the event as does the Gothamist. I wasn't able to watch the event live (not that I really want to see people shoving hot dogs in their faces for 12 minutes) so I apparently helped crash EatFeats along with whoever else was reloading their site to see the results. Sorry about that guys.
Is this the end of an era? Well, considering that Kobayashi was not in optimal condition, it's possible that he'll be itching for a rematch next year.

Other links of interest:
Kobayashi's official blog!
Contest Wikipedia entry in English and Japanese
Kobayashi on Wikipedia in Japanese and English
Eater Profiles at the IFOCE

そんぽ24 ハナコアラ Sonpo24's Hana Koala

A friend recently directed me to the commercials for insurance company そんぽ24. Their mascot characters are three koalas by the name of ゴロー, センタロー and ライタロー (Goro, Sentaro and Raitaro, sound it out and you'll figure out which is which) known as ハナコアラ Hana Koala and they have the...well, just look at the commercials for yourself (thanks to youtube user DJ774)



Yep, they can take off their noses and use them as mobile phones to contact Sonpo! It's a little bit disturbing but I can't stop watching. Maybe it's the song.

見直そう　見直そう～（そんぽ！）
自動車保険を見直そう　そんぽ24で見直そう
さあ　見積もりだ　見積もりだ！

The clip actually contains three different commercials. The third one (the last thirty seconds of the youtube video) is my favorite because of two things.
One is this:


The other is that one of the koalas realizes that his nose isn't a phone this time but a computer mouse.

They have tons of stuff at the hanakoala site including how to do the dance, the profiles of the characters (I've never seen ハナマドンナ though) and calendars.

A quick google check shows that ハナコアラ has his fans. Behold the ハナコアラ Bento! Apparently this person does this often.

If you really need the song, you can get it on Amazon!

リンガーハット ちゃんぽんちゃん! CM RingerHut: We are the CHAM-PON!

So Ringer Hut has a new character: CHAM-PON-chan! (I will forever capitalize it like that)

And, as you can see by the logo above the ad campaign for CHAM-PON is We are the CHAM-PON! Sounds suspiciously like the title to a well-known Queen song? Well, it's all part of the plan (thanks to YouTube user nakadamania):

I wonder if those gaijin extras knew what they were cheering for?
Also:


The Ringer Hut CM page is here.