During a recent live concert at Demodé Club in Modugno, Puglia, as a synth-only melody should have given his voice a moment of respite, singer and composer Giorgio Vanni yelled, “Su le mani per il capitano” (“put your hands up for the captain”). Whether surrounded by rave-like light beams in a clubby indoor venue, under the sweltering August sky, or even in a standard concert hall, Vanni consistently urges enthusiastic audiences with chants like “fuori la voce” (“sing it out”) and “vi voglio sentire” (“I want to hear you”), while a relentless four-on-the-floor thumping beat powers on.
This might sound like typical Eurodance fare, but Vanni isn’t your average Eurodance performer. Vanni, 61, and his artistic and business partner Massimo “Max” Longhi, 56 — known as “Il Capitano” (“the Captain”) and “L’Ammiraglio” (“the Admiral”) respectively — have become cult figures for millennial and Gen Z Italian fans. They are the voices and composers behind the localized opening songs for Pokémon, Dragon Ball, and One Piece, crafting Eurodance-style anthems for the Italian market.
This week on Polygon, we’re looking at how cultural differences affect media in a special issue we’re calling Culture Shock.
Vanni’s aforementioned synth-only melody is the instrumental interlude of “Viva i Pokemon,” Vanni and Longhi’s opening theme for the first 51 episodes of Pokémon in Italy. Audiences elsewhere around the world listened to French, German, Spanish, and other translations of Jason Paige’s “Pokémon Theme,” while Italy got a four-on-the-floor dance anthem, a new song composed and written from scratch with lyrics about the joy of exploring.
Localizing anime opening themes with original melodies and vocal tracks has been commonplace in Italy since 1978, when anime landed on the state-controlled RAI television network. Back then, the Japanese originals were simply deemed weird by those who oversaw the localization. Still, save for an early phase in the late 1970s and early 1980s (heavily influenced by disco, Europop, new wave, and synthpop), the bulk of early Italian localizations of anime themes could be described as Disney-lite (pop with a feel-good melody and instrumentation). This changed in 1998, when Vanni and Longhi started performing and composing opening themes synonymous with dance-music hits.
Vanni and Longhi owe their continued popularity not only to their danceable tunes but also to the fact that the bulk of the series they composed and/or performed the theme songs for aired back to back during weekday afternoons. Between 2001 and circa 2005, for example, kids and teens could, after school, watch Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, Naruto, and One Piece on the same day, hearing Vanni’s light-tenor timbre multiple times between 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Those kids and teens are now full-grown adults, and follow Vanni and Longhi in their copious live concerts, which they kicked off in 2009 at the leading European comic convention Lucca Comics & Games.
Take the case of Gianluca Allegretta, 28, a train conductor from Puglia and the co-admin of the Instagram anime-themed page Anime Age Italia. He has been watching anime since the early 2000s, when Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Naruto, and Detective Conan aired almost back to back. “Every time I’d come back from school, I always hoped I would make it on time to sing Vanni’s theme songs every single day,” he says. “They’re really seared in my heart and remind me of when I was little, a fancy-free time in my life I truly miss. ‘Viva i Pokemon’ remains Vanni’s most beautiful work in the Pokémon world.” Similarly, the other half of Anime Age Italia, Andrea Defronzo, 28, a book author and a nurse working for the Italian navy, has been following Pokémon since the Red/Blue era. “I owe a great part of my personality to watching anime,” he says. “I can never forget getting home from school and tuning in, and singing along to Giorgio [Vanni]’s theme songs, with my grandma smiling at me.”
So how did Pikachu conquer the dance floor?
Vanni and Longhi, both Milan natives, have been aware of each other since the 1980s, when they were both active in the Milanese live-music scene. Longhi was a pianist/keyboardist with a music degree from Milan’s Giuseppe Verdi conservatory of music, and Vanni was a vocalist for the pop-rock band Tomato. Once, Longhi even filled in for Tomato’s keyboardist at a gig.
“Our first official professional collaboration goes back to 1995,” Longhi says. “We were part of [then-teen TV host] Ambra Angiolini’s talk show Generazione X, where I was the live band’s musical director and he was the singer.” Generazione X was produced under Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcasting company, founded by former media mogul and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Like many 30-something Italians born in the mid-to-late 1960s, they had some degree of awareness of anime, but it didn’t define their tastes. Despite being a lifelong sci-fi nerd, Vanni says, “I was never really passionate about opening themes per se growing up. I cared more about music in general. I’d hear, say, the Space Pirate Captain Harlock Italian theme or Riccardo Zara’s version of Tiger Mask, and I’d love them, but as songs independent of their fictional universe.”
Longhi, meanwhile, felt fairly indifferent about anime and geek culture. Among his roles, he worked on arranging productions for Piero Cassano, a founding member of the synth-pop band Matia Bazar. Cassano also contributed to the localization of cartoon and anime theme songs for Mediaset’s channels. Overseeing this youth programming from 1980 to 2001 was Alessandra Valeri Manera, who not only directed kids’ and teens’ programming but also wrote lyrics for many of the original songs featured in these shows. These collaborations with Cassano led Longhi to pitch himself — with Vanni on vocals — to Valeri Manera in 1998. “She took a meeting with us and allowed us to present some demos. She liked them and was particularly impressed with the singer,” Longhi says. “Once she found out it was Giorgio, she said he should absolutely sing the final product.” What stood out in this audition was an original composition for an early version of DC’s Superman: The Animated Series. Valeri Manera hired them.
Their version of the theme song for Superman (titled “Superman”), which aired from September 1998 to January 1999, was the duo’s test run for a four-on-the-floor beat in an animated series aimed at children. If that version of “Superman” hadn’t worked, their second assignment under Valeri Manera, “Viva i Pokemon,” might never have come to be.
“I was composing and producing a lot of dance music back then, and Giorgio liked it too,” says Longhi. “When we were given the assignment for Pokémon, we said to ourselves, ‘Why don’t we make [opening themes] a little bit more tamarri [think Will Ferrell at A Night at the Roxbury, in contrast to the treacly, Disney-lite themes that dominated the anime localizations]?’ […] After all, those were the years of Haddaway’s ‘What Is Love.’”
Asked how they landed an assignment for a major player in the anime, video game, and merchandise space such as Pokémon, both insist it was just a gig, done almost like a product on an assembly line. “[Valeri Manera] understood the potential of the four-to-the-floor beat and gave us carte blanche, and, well, we obviously fully took advantage of it,” says Vanni.
The pair’s first Pokémon theme, “Viva i Pokemon,” was approved by Valeri Manera with few edits. In addition to its usage of synths, an electronic bassline, and a regular four-on-the-floor beat, it also stands out for its use of autotune. “Now, everyone uses autotune excessively, but in 1999, Cher’s ‘Believe’ had just come out,” says Longhi. “I took the title track’s signature style — the autotune — and put it into both Pokémon and Dragon Ball.” Vanni adds, “We were among the first in Italy to use that.”
Following Pokémon’s Italian premiere on Jan. 10, 2000, the song became one of Italy’s most popular anime opening themes. The fact that you could barely escape Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow in schoolyards (the games came out in Italy in the fall of 1999) clearly helped with the series’ popularity. But Vanni and Longhi also understood their audience’s tastes.
“When I was a kid, [Euro]dance music was basically served with your breakfast milk,” says musician Matteo Mucavero, 39, who, as a content creator under the moniker loqimusic, specializes in 1990s and Y2K nostalgia through the lens of dance music. He attributes the success of the genre to easy, earworm-like melodies and a rhythm above 130 bpm, which made it highly palatable for children, and to its frequent play in leisurely contexts such as arcades and carnivals. Those were the years of continent-wide Eurodance hits, such as Me&My’s self-titled album; Aqua’s album Aquarium; Eiffel 65’s Europop, which yielded the single “Blue”; and Vengaboys’ The Party Album. “Back then, dance music was as popular as pop music. The closest equivalent today is trap music; 9-year-olds listen to it just like 30-year-olds,” says Mucavero.
By the middle of 2000, Pokémon’s second season, which covered the latter part of the Indigo League and the Orange Islands, was fast approaching. Valeri Manera wanted another heavy-hitting theme to mark the change of location for Ash and his travel companions. “It was harder the second time around, because after composing a Eurodance anthem like ‘Viva i Pokemon,’ we thought we had already given it all,” says Longhi.
But the pair was not short of resources. “We already had a demo in mock-English, with the recurring phrase ‘I wanna know what I am,’” says Vanni, immediately adding that he could not recall what he had created that melody for in the first place. “Once [Valeri Manera] asked us to compose for the second season, and we already had this melody, we just superimposed the lyrics she had written. It was just perfect. The melody of the refrain is just our style signature,” Vanni continues, referring to the combination of ascending and descending chords that progress toward a resolution. You can also hear it in the chorus of their subsequent hits “What’s My Destiny Dragon Ball” (Dragon Ball Z) and “Andiamo tutti all’Arrembaggio, Forza!” (One Piece). Thus, “Oltre i cieli dell’avventura” (“beyond the skies of adventure”) was born, and the first episode of the season aired on Sept. 3, 2000.
“Oltre i cieli dell’avventura,” which covers episodes 52 to 116, is Longhi’s favorite. “The first is much more of a standard crowd-pleaser,” he says. “‘Oltre i cieli’ has a more solid structure, with a more singer-songwriter-like acoustic intro with piano and voice. If you listen to the piano intro of ‘Oltre i cieli,’ we were inspired by and wanted to homage Eiffel 65’s 1998 hit ‘Blue,’ produced by our friend Massimo Gabutti,” he says. “The first opening theme has had the strongest grip on our collective brain, if only because it was the very first one,” says Mucavero. “The second one is the one that, despite being Eurodance, makes you shed a tear, and that’s its winning formula.”
Valeri Manera
Vanni and Longhi have high praise for Valeri Manera, who passed away in 2024 at age 67, and who remains a divisive figure in the Italian anime community due to the degree of censorship she had to apply, at the urging of child psychologists, to the vast majority of the series. This included the treatment of queerness in Sailor Moon, where, for example, the canon romantic relationship between Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune is presented in very vague terms (coming across as a toxic friendship). Many fans, who convened in forums and were able to purchase Italian translations of manga, saw it as an infantilization of the medium. For Pokémon, Italy adhered to the censorship of the U.S. version.
“She changed the lives of myself and Max,” says Vanni. “She changed them to the point that losing her was like losing a sister, a mentor both professional and personal. She enriched our lives, and she brought so much joy to at least three generations of Italian anime watchers.”
While the duo continued to compose Italian Pokémon themes throughout the Diamond and Pearl arc, their subsequent nine songs did not make a splash as big as “Viva i Pokemon” and “Oltre i cieli dell’avventura.” Still, Vanni and Longhi’s sound ended up shaping the musical direction of Mediaset’s cartoon programming — at the height of their collaboration, they made approximately 24 theme songs per year, with typically only a synopsis and some generic video assets to get started.
After Valeri Manera stepped down in 2001, anime popularity on network TV started to decline, and by 2008, Mediaset began phasing out original songs for its anime and cartoon programming. Vanni and Longhi’s contributions to that universe have become more sporadic ever since. Their last Pokémon original song came out in 2007, covering the Diamond and Pearl arc, while their most recent official opening theme for an animated series was “My Hero Academia” for the eponymous series in 2018. Vanni and Longhi’s day job is at their record company LoVa Music (est. 2002), where they do sound design and commercial work, compose for Latin-pop and J-pop performers, and dabble in post-production for TV and film.
Still, they keep making tracks inspired by Pokémon and Dragon Ball, just as unofficial themes released on their own: “Pokemon Sole e Luna” (2019) is a Latin-pop and reggaeton number; “Pokémon Go” (2016) and “Dragon Ball Super Kamehameha” (2019), released for the launches of Pokémon Go and Dragon Ball Super, would not be out of place at any club doing a 2010s night. Plus, they often fully subvert their four-on-the-floor fame. Their 2022 album The Gold Session, for instance, inspired by lockdown-era jam sessions, contains acoustic versions of some of their most notable songs. “Oltre i cieli dell’avventura,” the only Pokémon theme included, was rearranged into a full-on power ballad (Mediaset owns the rights, while Vanni/Longhi own the master for this version). Usually, you see the opposite, i.e., ballads or classical crossover tracks getting the dance-beat treatment, such as Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te partirò” becoming Donna Summer’s 1999 Eurodance hit “I Will Go With You.”
“That’s because our melodies work. You can put any instrumentation underneath, but the melody has to be the main focus,” Vanni says. “That was always Alessandra’s request: ‘Guys, I am OK with your tunz tunz [the four-on-the-floor beat], your technology, your autotune, but please make the melodies catchy.’”
And catchy they are: Vanni and Longhi are constantly touring Italy, where they regularly fill venues that accommodate up to 10,000 people, with the majority of the fandom being Gen Z and millennials — yes, a mosh pit is included. In November 2024, the pair released a vinyl album with Sony Music containing not only their greatest hits but a new, non-cartoon-adjacent track titled “Uno di noi” (“one of us”), which reached No. 3 on the official Italian singles chart. “It has the four-to-the-floor beat, but in a more pop-friendly version,” says Longhi. “It’s dedicated to our public: During our concerts, they erupt with the stadium chant ‘uno di noi, Giorgio uno di noi,’” says Vanni. “Max and I are one of them, and they are one of us.”
