Bad Apple!!

**Bad Apple!!** is the title of the background music used for the third stage of the 1998 PC top-down scrolling shooter game Touhou Fantasy Land: Lotus Land Story, which is the fourth entry in the Touhou Project series. It is also the title of a Touhou fan animation using a remix of the song.

The original chiptune was remixed and given lyrics by nomico; this version was released by the doujin circle Alstroemeria Records, led by Masayoshi Minoshima. A fan of the game (under the username Μμ) created an extremely rough animatic which depicted various characters from the game series set to a shortened version of nomico's remix, and posted this animatic on Niconico along with a request for someone else to animate the sequence in full. Various animators took up the challenge, but most of their renditions received little attention. One particular animated version which featured seamless transitions between black and white silhouettes of the characters was created in 2010, to large amounts of acclaim both within and outside of the Touhou fandom. The animation's monochrome color scheme not only made it highly distinctive, but also reflects both the lyrics of the song (which repeatedly reference the world fading to black or white) and the game series' yin-yang motif.

The music video became popular as a tech demo of sorts - people often attempt to play the video on anything which is capable of displaying images, regardless of whether it was designed for that purpose or not. There are many variations of this video played on different types of displays, or painstakingly recreated frame-by-frame using unconventional tools and mediums. There are also many variations which feature other twists, such as replacing the Touhou characters with characters from other media.

## Notable recreations

### Bad Apple!! on r/place

In 2023, Bad Apple!! was recreated on r/place. Individual frames were drawn onto the canvas, with each new frame being drawn on top of the previous at a specific interval; when timelapse videos of r/place's collaborative canvas were created, the animation appeared appear to move due to each frame being recreated in order at a set rate.

The effort was heavily coodinated using Discord. Additionally, Reddit users involved in this recreation used an external tool which indicated where each pixel of the current frame needed to be placed, and moved ahead to the next frame at 40 second intervals. Users of the r/TouHou, r/Hatsune, and r/osu subreddits were most heavily involved with the project.

Partway through the video, the character Reisen fired a bullet which escaped the frame and went through other images on the canvas; this was unplanned, occurring as a result of users seeing a line (the bullet's path) appearing and independently deciding to extend it. Shortly afterward, a streamer attempted to grief the animation - however, their attempt at griefing was rapidly quashed. This rendition ended with text stating "Botting is Cringe!!" (pointing out that although many other images on the canvas were created using bots, Bad Apple was entirely drawn by actual users), followed by the Touhou title written in Kanji (東方).

## Further reading

* Bad Apple!! on Wikipedia
* Bad Apple!! on Know Your Meme

1. ↑ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/r-place-recreates-iconic-bad-apple-music-video-with-jaw-dropping-timelapse-2223664/