It’s time to dust off your Meteor Garden VCDs – if you have even kept them for 16 years.
Taiwanese producer Angie Chai has announced a reboot of the classic idol drama that gave the world four dreamy boys known as F4. The news has made fans all nostalgic for the 2001 show and the stars. Here are five things we remember.
1. ENTER F4 AND THEIR HAIR
The boys and their hairstyles make a memorable entrance in the first episode. Two cars stop at a school and Van Ness Wu is the first to step out, grinning and tossing his long, straight hair. Ken Chu and Vic Chou are next, both with chin-length hairstyles. Finally, Jerry Yan joins them, standing tall and looking faintly ludicrous with a bouffant hairdo.
(But don’t laugh. This is hair that produced a revolution. In Indonesia, young men would straighten their hair to look like F4. In the Philippines, it was reported that one teenager killed another in a dispute over whose hair looked more like Chou’s.)
2. BREATHLESS PACING
Apart from the casting and the hairstyling, there is a reason the drama became a runaway success. The adaptation of the girl’s comic series Boys Over Flowers is fast and fun from the word go. The seesawing love-hate relationship between Yan’s cocky Daoming Si and Barbie Hsu’s dogged Shancai starts in the first episode.
3. AWFUL COSTUMES
Can we say it now? The rich kids in the show don’t look it probably because the drama was made on a shoestring, for NT$500,000 an episode. Chai has said F4’s costumes were from small shops in Ximending.
4. A YOUNG RAINIE YANG IS IN IT
Before she became a bigger star, she had a small role in Meteor Garden as Xiaoyou, the sweet girl who likes Chu’s playboy Ximen.
5. YAN IS AN UNDERRATED ACTOR
As Daoming Si, he had the funniest, cutest lines (“If apologies worked, would the police be needed?”). And you remember them because he said them right.
This article was first published on April 12, 2017.
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