The opening is once again taken from Sifl and Olly, even though the mashup itself isn't.

Anyway, I wanna take this time to talk about the character in Bust a Groove 2 that you fight to the original version of this song.

The Bust a Groove games are a bizarre mix of rhythm and fighting games. The first two games have a story mode where you dance against some of the other playable characters and then face off against a final boss, like most traditional fighting games. In Bust a Groove 2, if you complete a certain requirement, you can fight a hidden bonus character after beating the boss.

The bonus character in question is a guy named Pander.

Now, the Bust a Groove games have a very distinct style of character design. Just look up "Bust a Groove characters" in Google and you'll see what I mean. Cartoony, exaggerated propotions, big anime eyes, the works. And when the fight begins, Pander follows that style, appearing as a tiny cartoon panda.

Then, after a few seconds, Pander changes. Ohhhh boy, does he change.

It turns out that Pander is actually a photorealistic, balding middle-aged man wearing nothing but white underwear with a panda tail on the back, black tights on his arms and legs, a brown loafer on one of his feet, and drippy body paint that vaguely resembles a panda.

The weirdness doesn't stop there. Most of the characters in the game have distinct dance styles, like breakdancing, capoeira, house, vogue, etc.. Pander has a distinct dance style as well, but his style is based on Japanese Butoh theater. His dance rarely syncs well with the music for any character, including his own.

According to Wikipedia, he's "A man who is attracted only by a cartoon character of 15 years old, based on the first butoh performance of the book "Forbidden Colors" by Yukio Mishima, as the "actor" playing Pander struggles to come to terms with his taboo sexuality." Okay.

His stage is no better. It starts off as a blank, white room with black-and-white pictures of various landmarks, historic moments, and mundane stuff like fruit and vegetables displayed on screens in the background. After a while, the whole stage goes dark and becomes a giant rainbow void, and remains that way for the rest of the song.

And it gets worse. In the Japanese version of the game, beating the story mode rewards you with a cutscene showing your character appearing on a This Is Your Life-style game show that goes into their backstory. Despite being in full English, these were removed from the English version, most likely because there were so many things they would have to censor (one cutscene opens with the game show host saying "What do you need to get the Beatles back together again? Three more bullets!"). Anyway, every regular character had these cutscenes. The two unlockable boss characters had them as well, though they were shorter than the regular ones. For Robo-Z Gold (the standard final boss), the game show host shows up on stage and gets stepped on by a giant robot foot, ending the cutscene. While kind of unusual, it's not too unexpected since the game show host usually ends up getting harmed in various ways during the regular characters' endings (likely another reason why they were removed).

For Pander's, it just shows the empty set of the game show with nobody in the crowds and no music playing. The lights are off. The game show host is nowhere to be seen. Then the curtain opens and Pander silently hops to the center of the stage, on one foot. Then the credits roll.

Forgive me for rambling, but Pander is just so goddamn bizarre that I can't let him fade into obscurity.