YMMV / Cheap Trick

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• Americans Hate Tingle: Despite Cheap Trick's enormous popularity in Japan, "The Flame" flopped there, reaching just #63 on the Oricon pop charts.
• Awesome Music:
  • "This next one... Is the first song... On our new album... It just came out this week... It's called... SURRENDER!" At Budokan is pretty commonly referred to as their best album for a good reason.
  • The closing chorus to Surrender, "We're all alright!" gets even more awesome at live shows when the crowds join in.
  • Anyone who's seen Top Gun will attest to the awesomeness of "Mighty Wings". This includes the instrumental version that plays during Maverick's first training hop.
  • The opening moments of the album, before the band even gets to play a note, are riveting: Massed teenage screaming of Japanese girls, a couple of drum hits, a couple of purposeful chicken scratches on guitar, and then a stentorian American voice bellowing:
    Announcer: ALL RIGHT TOE-KYO! [Screaming Japanese girls] ARE YOU READ-AY! [Screaming Japanese girls] WILL YOU WELCOME... EPIC RECORDING ARTISTS... CHEAP TRICK!! [Frenetic opening riff].
• Epic Riff: "Surrender", "Dream Police", tons of others...
• Estrogen Brigade: Listen to At Budokan to hear just how popular these guys were with Japanese teenage girls.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the band is one of the small few '70s power pop bands to maintain critical acclaim and moderate success with their new releases in the US (2009's The Latest being especially warmly received), the band has been absolutely massive in Japan since their debut album and have only seem to have grown in popularity since.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "ELO Kiddies" from the first album is a playful send-up of Gary Glitter. A few decades later, kiddies became a career-killer for Gary. For bonus points the very next song, "Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School", is about a pedophile.
• Memetic Mutation: Bun E. Carlos' chain-smoking before he quit. The band even once made a T-shirt featuring him with a cigarette in his mouth.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Jon Brant replacing Tom Petersson on bass during The '80s. Also counts as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute given their general resemblance to each other.
  • Rick's son Daxx replacing Bun E. on drums since 2010.
• Signature Song: "Surrender", "I Want You to Want Me", or "The Flame".

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