I’m trying to decide if this is horrible, or hilarious.
The worst show is the Japanese version of > Candid Camera> . Perfectly nice people stroll along on a sunny day and decide to use a public toilet stall, like the ones we have in Canada for construction workers, but bigger and nicer.
These unfortunate men are filmed inside the stall pulling down their pants and squatting on the toilet when suddenly the interior of the stall, toilet included, is hydraulically whisked up into public view. Some men freeze and attempt to blend in with the landscape, but the rest desperately try to get their pants back on, and you can imagine.
They’re lucky. Sometimes they pull out the floor and toilet horizontally on a Jet-Ski. But these horrified toilet-goers are naked from the waist down, clinging to a pole at high speed and then nearly drowned if they overturn while trying to dress, or perhaps kill, themselves.
Japanese humor is very different from that in the West. There is a lot
of stuff they find funny that many of us would think cruel. I once saw a
bit where a man would walk up behind a fellow pedestrian in Tokyo and
suddenly scream in their ear while a camera crew filmed it. The studio
audience seem to enjoy it… I didn’t get it at all.
Like the Japanese game show host on the Simpsons said: “Where your
American game shows reward knowledge, our game shows punish
ignorance!”
I understand that new TV shows, inspired by Japanese TV, are being planned for American TV soon. One of the themes will be humiliation. You can guess that the Fox network will be big with this.
I have no idea what the original Japanese tv show was about, but there’s a program on the Spike channel called MXC Most Extreme Elimination. Like the examples mentioned above (some of which are available on YerTube), it puts ordinary people through a series of bizarre challenges at what appears to be a Japanese sports park of some kind, the object of which is to embarrass and humiliate the contestants.
I find the events themselves surprising at first, but then repetitive. The show’s producers have provided an English voice-over that I doubt has anything to do with the original show. Worth a laugh, but doesn’t bear repeated viewings.
Is that still on? My husband used to watch it - it must be at a different time now.
There was a new show on US TV last week - I forget the name, but it was like MXC only a US version. And after that they had some idiotic thing called “I survived a Japanese game show.” I don’t think we’ll waste our time on that one again.
Worth a laugh, but doesn’t bear repeated viewings.