Maximum Extreme Hilarity
by: Matthew Ralph

Like the TV shows Iron Chef and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 before it, the dubbed-over Japanese import Most Extreme Elimination Challenge gets its laughs out of the keen observations of the subtle unintentional humor of bad television.

Similar in concept to Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? or the more recent Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, the show takes footage from an old game show — Takeshi's Castle — and completely revamps it into a laugh-out-loud comedy.

Pitting teams of coworkers from various careers — meat packers, cartoon voice over artists, municipal workers and secretaries to name a few — the show takes footage already bizarre and extravagant to begin with and inserts the type of humor a room full of drunk fratboys might come up with on a particularly inspiring night. A nod of the head or the raising of a fist by one of the contestants instantly becomes an innuendo with a dubbed voice, especially in the many games where balls are used to pummel the contestant as they precariously walk across a rope bridge or a path of falling dominoes.
It's like that old Nickelodeon game show Wild and Crazy Kids on crack. The costumes are big and outrageous — try a giant head to toe hand costume of a giant foam hand or a race horse with training wheels on for size — and the games range from dumb to dumber. Okay, swing on this rope over a moat and try and get yourself to stick onto the side of this building, okay? Got it? Good. Now go. One can only imagine the kind of law suits that would result if this were actually staged on American soil.

Plaintiff sues for injury sustained while falling out of a giant tea cup sliding down a hillside. Woman sues after breaking neck on a giant roller suspended six feet over a pit of mud. The possibilities for permanent injury and out of court settlements are endless.

As we already know from watching the Simpsons in their visit to the Pacific rim or may recall in UHF's "Wheel of Fish" show, game shows in Japan seem to differ from their American counterparts in that foolishness is ridiculed and exploited. Take the short-lived Japanese program, for example, where contestants had to see how close they could get a falling frying pan to their head without being hit with it. The "You're so stupid!" catch phrase could be used more than once watching MXC.

Watching the foolishness of contestants falling from the sky, being flattened by someone in a giant foam costume, hit in the groin with a ball thrown at point blank range or impaled by a swift-moving platform barely big enough to stand on is one of the drawing points of the show. We laugh because we know these stunts would make lawyers rich in our country and prefer the funny get-ups and hairdos of the contestants and the odd situations they are put in to the large breasted women sticking their heads in a vat of eyeballs and intestines in the gross-out Fear Factor.

Co-host Kenny Blankenship closes out each program with a replay of his top 10 extreme eliminations and we get to laugh all over again at the mishap of some poor idiotic contestant who only wanted their 15 minutes. When you think about it it's an even trade. They laugh at Friends dubbed into Japanese and we laugh at footage of an old program that would look just about as ridiculous to us now as a spiced up version of Double Dare if the overdubs had enough toilet humor added in to jump from the family friendly Nickelodeon to the man-friendly Spike TV.

With that in mind, this show is best recommended for watching with a room full of guys, clearly defining the demographic Spike is so ardently aiming for in cable land. This isn't to say that women aren't enjoying the show. After all, the founder of a growing Web community devoted to the show is in fact a woman. Brooke Castro, of Redding, Cal. saw the show once, laughed her butt off and decided to start her own fanclub and Web site.

"I fell in love with MXC the moment I saw it," said Castro in a recent e-mail correspondence. "Stunned and laughing my @ss off... I immediately went online to find out more about this insanely funny show. But there was NOTHING!  So I decided to start an MXC Yahoo Club myself."

To date, close to 4,000 people have signed up for the fanclub since it started in July 2003. Castro even had a character — Brooke Peelbacks — named after her in one of the shows in the upcoming season two, which debuts this spring.
As Brooke and her thousands of club members have found, MXC is outright hilarious for all the reasons it intends.

Like Iron Chef and MST3000, it's simply making fun of stuff that is so offbeat it's funny and doing all the work for us.

For Sean Hutchinson, a chemical engineering student at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the show's brilliance lies with the commentary.

"It's all about the commentary and the way they come up with stuff that has no connection to the original show," he said. "It's hilarious. Usually the only game shows with people doing stuff like on MXC is with kids. like 'GUTS', or 'What would you do?' from Nickelodeon's days of yore so the fact that you're seeing adults doing it, I think that adds to it as well."

Of course, the fact that the footage is completely manipulated for comedic purposes leaves one wondering what the object of the original game show was and what in the world they'd actually be saying if the show had been seriously translated into English.

Surely, this program in its original format was funny, because no matter what culture it is, someone slamming their head into a wall or getting flattened by a large boulder running up a hill is funny. And a guilty pleasure when it comes to watching the former Nashville network that is quickly outgrowing its Spike Lee lawsuit claim to fame and putting all memory of the network it once was behind them.

posted [02.23.04]

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