This show hasn’t even started yet and it cracks. Me. Up. KBS’s second attempt at the variety-drama hybrid format, The Best Hit, has a week left until it premieres, and they’ve just released a hilarious 30-second teaser in the form of a ’90s music video featuring Yoon Shi-yoon (Mirror of the Witch) and Hong Kyung-min (Because I Love You) as members of idol boy band J2. I just wish they had made it full-length, ‘cause this is pure gold.
There are times words and pictures just don’t do a video justice, and this is definitely one of those times. I was born in the ’90s and quite young when it was over, so I don’t have too many memories of the decade, but this mini music video definitely re-triggered a nostalgia for the era I had developed after the Answer Me series. The gold-tinted frame, the back-lit tunnel, the boombox, the BUCKET HATS. It’s perfect. And also, amusingly accurate. Don’t just take my word for it, take a look at the old-school H.O.T. music video below for context. (It’s for research! Science!)
Yoon Shi-yoon’s character Yoo Hyun-jae is described as a musical genius gifted with songwriting, dancing, and singing skills that put him at the top of the idol game when he debuted back in 1993. However, his life gets turned upside down when he is presumably propelled into the future, and he’s reduced to nothing but the neighborhood bum. The drama is about him mixing it up with other youths in present-day Seoul, which should make for some great laugh-out-loud scenarios since some of them will be in the idol industry, and he’s basically a grandfather in idol age and perspective.
Below are some recently released stills of Yoon Shi-yoon and Lee Se-young (Laurel Tree Tailors), engaged in one leg of a really, really awkward love triangle (square? Pentagon?) across two generations between Kim Min-jae’s (The Lonely Shining Goblin), his mom Yoon Son-ha (Six Flying Dragons) and dad Cha Tae-hyun (The Producers). It may become one of the weirdest love polygons I’ve seen in dramaland.
I trust that this show will be zany enough to make it work, though. A lot of the promo material has been pretty tongue-in-cheek, and the news articles hilariously keep referring to Cha Tae-hyun as Ra Jun-mo (his PD character in The Producers), so I have high hopes this show will bring the comedy in spades.
The Best Hit will be the first entry in KBS’s newly revived Friday-Saturday slot, and will premiere on June 2. For those of you interested, a prologue to the show will air an hour before the first episode next week. I don’t usually tune into those extended preview offerings, but I might check this one out if it means more Yoon Shi-yoon in the ’90s.
