![]() Fortunately, those who aren’t locked up can escape the lethal impact using a remote. ![]() Rumor has it that a handful of states already are considering piping episodes of “Japanese Game Show” into the execution chamber as a novel method of sending those on death row to the Great Beyond, but officials fear it will be struck down as cruel and unusual punishment. It’s not just the game itself that proves so torturous but all of the ridiculous add-ons that go with it: the childlike cartoon visages of various animals, the sound effects that appear to have been lifted from a preschool’s arsenal, the pep-rally hysteria of the audience and of course a host whose mission seems to be pushing the contestants to rehab. The zany challenges - people smashing eggs with their butt wearing a chicken suit or covering themselves in flour in myriad ways - pile up to the point where we’re literally screaming for the visual assault to stop. But instead, it’s just the same dopey, preening, hallucinatory vibe over and over. If this were consistently funny or remotely interesting, we could of course forgive the fact that “Japanese Game Show” bisects the Seventh Circle of Hell. It’s a reality show-within-a-game show, with the winner taking home $250,000 and the glory of being made a laughingstock before the citizenry of two nations. Based loosely on a concept imported by executive producer Tim Crescenti from Denmark, the idea here involves whisking 10 unwitting Americans to Japan to compete before a live audience and a cloying, jeering Japanese host, Rome Kanda. It starts off with a game in which Americans are made to eat off of a plate attached to the head of a teammate running on a treadmill. In the first season the teams were called the Yellow Penguins and Green Monkeys, the second season the Green Tigers and the Red Robots. That said, it really is funny to watch this show for about five minutes. We’re left scrambling for our mouse and the left-click button, only to realize to our horror that we’ve again been full-on invaded by Japan. Rome Kanda hosts a new crop of 12 American contestants who are whisked away to Japan to compete in the ultimate Japanese game show. Ten Americans, many of whom have never traveled beyond the borders of the United States, head to Japan to compete in the ultimate Japanese game show. The idea that we’d sit at our computer monitors and guffaw at the culturally befuddling absurdity that goes along with being a Japanese contestant is one thing, but to think it would cross over to American TV takes the joke a surrealistic step too far. I Survived a Japanese Game Show: With Rome Kanda, Donnell Pittman, Meaghan Cooper, Mary Catherine Greenawalt. In their game shows, the Japanese have elevated cruelty to an art form. There’s a reason that idiotic, humiliating games that transform people into human fertilizer are a staple of TV in Japan and not the U.S. Ten Americans, many of whom have never traveled beyond the borders of the United. It’s rather like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that should have stayed a skit and not wound up on the big screen (“It’s Pat! - The Movie”). Subtitles I Survived a Japanese Game Show TV Series, 2 Season, 15 Episode. With ABC’s “I Survived a Japanese Game Show,” we get the equivalent of a 45-second YouTube video stretched to an hour, week after painful week.
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