VIP Teacher

About

VIP Teacher (Japanese: VIP先生, Bippu Sensei), also called “Mariotropolis” (マリオトロポリス), refers to a series of parodies and remixes inspired by phonetic translations in a flash movie featuring a fan-made Super Mario RPG song. On the Japanese web, this was one of the most famous memes originated in 2channel’s /news4vip/ board, and it also had a large affect on the early days of the video remix culture in niconico Douga (niconico).

Origin

In around the beginning of May 2005, a Spanish blogger Javi Agenjo, also known as tamat, uploaded a flash movie titled “Mariotropolis” on his website.^[1] It is consisting of a weird dancing robot acted by German actress Brigitte Helm^[2] in 1927 silent Sci-Fi film Metropolis^[3] and a ROBOVoice remix version for Super Mario RPG Song. The flash creator cited the audio track from a YTMND page submitted in April 2005^[4], but it was originally posted to Newgrounds by DJ XBrav in June 2004.^[5]

Spread

This cheap but addictive flash movie caught an attention among users in 2channel where phonetic translations, or Soramimi^[6], had become a popular flash movie trend by the hits of “Numa Numa” and “Moskau” in those days. And the biggest reaction was drawn from the /news4vip/ board since the phonetic translation for a phrase “Peeps Insane”, “Bippu Sensei” (lit. “VIP Teacher”), win the hearts of the board users usually called VIPPER. Just after the first thread for this flash movie was submitted to /news4vip/ board early on May 8th, 2005^[7], heavy traffic surged at tamat’s server. According his blog post on the evening of the same day, the number of access from Japan in that day had reached over 20,000 and he had to take down it to avoid exceeding the transfer limit for that month.^[8] Many parody flash movies and pictures for VIP Teacher were quickly created by getting inspirations from silly phonetic translations given from VIPPERs, and those are archived into a portal site for VIP Teacher which was launched on the following day.^[9]

Besides, tamat revealed in another blog post in the following year that his “Mariotropolis” also caught some attention in France as well.^[10]

niconico

VIP Teacher brought back into the spotlight in the first half of 2007 by the launch of niconico. The “Mariotropolis” flash was reprinted to niconico from the very beginning of the service^[11], and VIP Teacher has become one of the classics in niconico’s video remix culture as shown by the song being included into “Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga”, the second track in the original Nico Nico Medley series released in June 2007.^[12] On November 30th 2013, it made a headline on the Japanese web that a niconico user shota made the HD Remastered Version for VIP Teacher (shown below) from the blu-ray edition for Metropolis released in 2010.^[13]

Niconico 【HDデジタルリマスター】VIP先生【高画質高音質】

VIP Teacher also brought a large online popularity to the original song “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms” (森のキノコにご用心) composed by Yoko Shimomura.^[14] Since after the hit of a Lucky StarMAD video in the summer of 2008 (shown below)^[15], this song has been sometimes utilized in MADs.^[16]