PaRappa the Rapper (TV series)

PaRappa the Rapper (パラッパラッパー) is a 2001 American-Japanese anime television series based on and a prequel to NanaOn-Sha's PaRappa the Rapper video game series created by Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Alan Greenblat. The series was produced by J.C.Staff and aired in Japan on Fuji TV between April 2001 and January 2002, running for thirty episodes. Episodes 29 and 30 aired together as a 1-hour special.

Summary
The series focuses on PaRappa, a cute and happy dog who enjoys music, dancing and spending time with his friends PJ Berri, Katy Kat, and his love interest, Sunny Funny. The show includes various characters who make returning appearances from the video games. It also introduces several new characters who are exclusive to the TV series, such as Matt Major, an athletic, popular dog, Paula Fox, Katy's rival, but Sunny's friend, Pinto, PaRappa's little sister, and Gaster and Groober, a villainous duo who cause all sorts of mischief.

Production
During the production of PaRappa the Rapper 2, Sony wanted to develop a PaRappa anime aimed at children in order to boost merchandise sales. The series was a joint production effort between Fuji TV, SME Visual Works, and J.C.Staff. Rodney Greenblat, the art director for the PaRappa games, was asked to design new characters who would appear in the anime. He was against the idea of the show being aimed towards children and instead wanted it to be aimed towards teenagers, but this did not end up happening. He was not allowed to work on the anime at all aside from the character design, as the anime team did not want anyone pulled away from the production of the second game. In an interview with Gamasutra, Greenblat voiced his frustration about the production of the anime. ""I wasn't into that, because I was like "Everyone knew teenagers loved PaRappa, so let's do a teen show". But [Sony] wanted to sell toys, so [the show's producers] made a little kids version of PaRappa. Then they wanted me to design other characters for the show. And I was "okay, but let me write some of the episodes that these new characters will be in" and they didn't let me do that. They only let me design characters, they didn't let me write or be part of the show's production, and I felt as if I was kicked, in a way, out of something I always wanted to do. I always wanted to work in animation, to see my characters on a TV show. So the TV show was not a success, it was not a good show. I don't know about the writing because it was all in Japanese, but apparently it didn't connect with the kids, they didn't like it. And the time-slot it was on turned out to be a disaster. A big deal was made, it had a prime slot for little kids, but it kept on getting preempted by baseball games. There was two different animation houses doing the show and each had a slightly different style and that was really bugging me; my characters looked a little different in one episode to the next"."

Music
The series' soundtrack was composed by series designer Masaya Matsuura, along with Yoshihisa Suzuki and Yasushi Kurobane. The series uses four pieces of theme music; two opening themes and two ending themes. For the first fifteen episodes, the opening theme is "Love Together: PaRappa the Rapper MIX" (LOVE TOGETHER〜パラッパラッパーMIX〜) by Nona Reeves while the ending theme is "School Girl" by Bennie K. For episodes sixteen onwards, the opening theme is "Attitude" by Crystal Kay while the ending theme is "Yellow Balloon" (イエローバルーン) by Chara. The original soundtrack was released in two volumes by Sony Music Entertainment in 2001 on August 22 and December 19, respectively.