"We Also Build Poor-Quality Cars and Inferior-Style Electronics".

Oh. My. God. My blog is actually useful. See, livejournal user n0w emailed me about this show called MXC, telling me that it's a new version of "Takeshi's Castle". This is some useful information.

Here's what TVHome.com has to say about it : "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (or "MXC") is the ultimate in reality sports, where contestants comprised of two teams are physically and mentally challenged and eliminated through crazy and challenging games."

This was not encouraging description. I recorded one episode, expecting a new American Gladiators type show. But oh no no no no no! It's nothing but. This is a creation of a few of mentally challenged Spike TV producers who somehow got their hands on vintage Takeshi's Castle footage and proceeded to anally rape it.

Here's what these brilliant minds did to the poor thing:
* They renamed the main characters. General Tani became Captain Tenneal, Count Count Beat Takeshi became Vic Romano. Count Takesh's advisor whose name I don't know became Kenny Blankenship.
* They edited the footage to somehow give the impression that the original one hundred something contestants are broken up into two teams.
* They completely replaced the dialogue Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, but with a lot of crude, frequently homophobic and sometimes even racist comments.
* They removed the actual storming of Takeshi's castle, although you sometimes can see the castle in the background. Instead they show replays of the more painful falls and scrapes that the contestants suffer.

Of course, it is possible that the owners of Takeshi's Castle footage sold it under the condition that it should be disfigured like this. Or Spike TV did not have enough money for a Japanese translator. Or some bigwig came up with these brilliant enhancements and the poor producers had no chance but to go along. Then I apologize for calling this mutilation one of the dumbest things on TV.

The original Japanese show had so many things going for it, no wonder I remembered it for 12-15 years after seeing a couple of episodes. It has hundreds of regular people facing almost impossible tasks. Most of them failed at these tasks, facing painful and humiliating falls. Yet they showed fighting spirit, hanging on as long as possible, getting up drenched in dirt and mocked by Takeshi's henchmen, yet not loosing face. Instead of concentrating so much on humiliating falls, in the original show they replayed attempts that showed the most determination, to this day I remember the guy who tilted at about 20 degrees to the ground on the stepping stones challenge, yet made one more jump. The actual storming of the castle was a great thing to look forward to at the end of the show, even though the contestants succeeded only a couple of times through the whole run of the series.

Well, I guess this mutant of a show is still watchable if you mute the moronic braying of the idiotic remixers. "Now, our game shows are a little different from yours. Your shows reward knowledge; we punish ignorance". Well, our shows do not rewards knowledge. They punish the viewers. I so wish I could enact that Tivo commercial, where a couple of guys throw a network boss out the window, with MXC creators.

General Hayati Tani renamed for us, "average American Joe Salaryman waiters".