Opening theme from Frogger is a nursery rhyme

[Tangentg]

​Just now I learnt that Frogger's theme actually came from this song. I first heard this song from a Taiko: Drum Master game and immediately recognized Frogger. I then wondered which came first, but wasn't able to find any info on it in English. So I decided to put the name of this song and Frogger's name in Japanese and then I found the Japanese Wikipedia article on Frogger that has this line: "この他にもスタート時には童謡の「犬のおまわりさん」など、...", which says something like "another [something] at the start is the nursery rhyme of "犬のおまわりさん"", which would be the name of the song in the video.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQuUossxMxU

[CatPix]

Cool find!

It's less fun than findign that the music in Yoshi's Island is the Soviet/Russian hymn, but it's a much more obscure reference here!

[killersquirel]

My girl is Japanese and the moment that she heard me playing Frogger she started to sing this song. Amidar also has a Japanese tune for the bonus level. I'm pretty sure the name Amidar is derived from the bonus level in this game which is taken from some various gambling game in Japan.

[Tangentg]

The name Amidar is derived from a lottery thing which we have here in Hong Kong as well so it's probably an Asian thing. Here at least we don't use it for gambling most of the time. It's more used in stuff like a prize lottery in a birthday party or something.

 

I've only played the Atari 2600 version (I did check out the arcade version once briefly and that was it) so I never remembered any music from it.

[Jess Ragan]

Might explain why the later versions of Frogger have most of the music removed. If the song's owned by Sanrio, it's doubtful they'd let Konami use it without charging royalties.

[The Usotsuki]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Leg

[onmode-ky]

Might explain why the later versions of Frogger have most of the music removed. If the song's owned by Sanrio, it's doubtful they'd let Konami use it without charging royalties.

The song, "Inu no Omawarisan" ("The Doggy Policeman"), isn't owned by Sanrio, but it is a copyrighted piece of music written in 1960, according to Japanese Wikipedia (until reading that just now, I'd thought it was old/traditional along the lines of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but it seems it's pretty recent). Frogger actually uses several pieces of copyrighted music, including four opening title themes from then-current TV anime series. I talked about this in more detail in this post last year in the AtGames 2016 Flashbacks thread, which was an extension of this earlier post I'd written in the same thread, on Araiguma Rascal/Rascal the Raccoon's opening tune being in Frogger; since all these pieces of music were from different sources, it seems unlikely that Konami did this with permission. All these songs being owned by different entities is why modern-era re-releases/remakes of Frogger don't use the arcade music.

 

Actually, come to think of it, the first time I wrote about Araiguma Rascal and Frogger was at the bottom of this post, in May 2010. Geez, seven years already?

 

onmode-ky

[+FujiSkunk]

This isn't entirely unlike how the first Pole Position race track copied the real-life Fuji Speedway (no relation). Using the lay-out of a real-life race track is not necessarily a problem (I don't think you can copyright the shape of a road), but borrowing a real-life name without permission will raise lawyers' eyebrows. Namco did it again in Pole Position II, modeling and naming the hardest track after the real-life Suzuka Circuit. Nowadays, ports and official emulations of those games call them the Namco and Wonder tracks.