Not surprisingly, "Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi" is the work of a crazed fan. Sam Register, the Cartoon Network vice president who created the show, had never heard of Puffy Ami Yumi until the summer of 2001, when he stumbled across the video for their single "Boogie Woogie No. 5" on a cable access channel in New York. "I waited until the end of the video, which I never do, to find out if I could see their name," he said. "But the credits were in Japanese, so I had no idea who they were."
A year later Mr. Register happened to hear the song again, this time on National Public Radio. "I heard the words Puffy Ami Yumi, and I heard the word Sony," he said. "That's all I needed in my quiver to go after it."
Meanwhile, Sony Japan was trying to establish Puffy Ami Yumi in North America with relatively little success. Although the duo had sold more than 14 million albums and had made a popular television variety show in Japan, the odds of making a big impact in the United States were small. Apart from Pink Lady, who had a minor hit ("Kiss in the Dark") and a famously bad television show in 1979, there hasn't been a major American breakthrough by a Japanese pop act since Kyu Sakamoto topped the charts with "Sukiyaki" in 1963.
Mr. Register decided Puffy Ami Yumi would be different. "A lot of Japanese music is horrible," he said. But where juggernauts like Ms. Hamasaki or the charmingly amateurish girl group Morning Musume tend to favor either impossibly upbeat dance tunes or overly sentimental ballads, Puffy Ami Yumi's sound seemed more familiar than exotic. It is firmly rooted in rock 'n' roll, and the producer, Tamio Okuda, wrapped the songs in arrangements that evoked rock acts from the Beatles and the Who to Rockpile and Elvis Costello.
Still, it wasn't until Mr. Register got the duo to record a theme song for the "Teen Titans," a semicomic cartoon series about adolescent superheroes, that Puffymania began to take hold at Cartoon Network. "Everybody at the network started singing the 'Teen Titans' theme song," he said. "That gave me the boost I needed."
