Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Teejay Marquez, Below-The-Radar International Fame

UPDATE: Checking the sources of my audience always brings a nice surprise. Our number 1 country for the last two days was not the Philippines nor the US. It was Indonesia. And they were all clicking on this post which was first published last June 26, 2015. Unfortunately I discovered all the videos were taken down. It's easy to look for substitutes however, that's how popular Teejay Marquez' dubmash videos have become. I posted more, thus the repost.

 Teejay Marquez is apparently already creating some ripple at  the start of his 3-month foray in our neighbor down south. He has appeared in many programs on Indonesian TV (Rumpi No Secret , INI Talk Show, etc.), did a magazine photoshoot, attended some showbiz parties & got photographed with certain Indonesian personalities.

June 26, 2015 - I often read my news in other languages to keep abreast with the many languages that I had the chutzpah to learn. A year ago, imagine my surprise when I chanced upon an Indonesian blogpost about the fan club of a Pinoy actor whose name I haven't even heard of then. It was called 
Teejaynatics and they were busy fundraising to finance his trip to Indonesia (which they ultimately accomplished & he went to visit them). To gather material for this blog, I had to spread my reading to more countries and while researching other artists,  my surprise only grew: I inadvertently discovered he has fans in  Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Thailand, and even Russia. In fact, he was included as one of the ten best-looking Pinoy actors by an Indonesian magazine website. Star power in action here, & I don't even know the star. How can one become a star in the Philippines? To tell you the truth, despite the many Pinoy movies and teleseryes shown outside, both pirated and legal, only a few Pinoy stars really stood out, that's how lackluster most of the stars churned out here in recent years despite the hype spinned around them. While we're winning all those international beauty titles, the stars of our silver screen became more and more ordinary, just as the stars of our neighbors looked more & more like the Pinoy stars of yesteryears (Thailand, which was never under Western occupation has practically replaced its superstars line-up with Western hybrids). For two decades of teleseryes, only Kristine Hermosa & Marian Rivera really created a big impact outside  (but what an impact!). It took James Reid only last year to pull the attention of the world towards the Pinoy teen stars, and fortunately, the teen stars were pretty & cute this time (a few years earlier during Jolina's time & I'm pretty sure it would have been a dud). We have a deep bench of beautiful people, deeper than our neighbors, but I wonder why the worms even reach the spotlight. Perennial Pinoy masochism? Pinoys always find a reason to sabotage their main assets...

Teejay Marquez created ripples outside just by being cute in his Youtube clips. I wonder how big the wave would be if he had a proper break. In the latest twist of his below-the-radar fame, 3 of his so-called Dubmash compilations are getting viral, pushed from 3 directions: first from the Russian Post-Soviet space (where he got hitched with the current preoccupation with Pinoy teen stars engendered by pirated teen films and the television showing in Kazakhstan of Forevermore), the middle from Vietnam (which like Malaysia, is an avid follower of Pinoy showbiz) & the bottom from India.(NOTE: For some dubious reasons, all those clips disappeared from Youtube at the same time. But Teejay has so many fans that it's easy to look for reolacements)

For the record, in an interview in a Malaysian website, he claimed not having foreign blood. That's Pinoy for you: the mixing of blood among the races happened through the centuries you only know  it's gotta be Asian.


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