My evening was cleverly spent. I’ve been neglecting Mr. TV for a while, since, uh, programming on TV SUCKS, but today since I was bored I decided to flip through the channels. I landed in the Wonderful Channel of 8, one of those channels that has different programming every day. On weekday afternoons, it’s the California Music Channel – like a radio station with music videos… not like MTV which doesn’t even show music videos anymore. Other times it’s a shopping channel. And sometimes, it’s Fuji-TV, a Japanese programming channel! Huway huway!
So believe it or not, I switched to channel 8 and Fuji-TV was on. What caught my attention was a SANRIO DANCE PARTY. Dozens of fat Japanese kids and multiple people in Hello Kitty and Keroppi costumes were dancing to the beat of this guy dressed up as a plastic cow. A 3D model of the same plastic cow guy danced along in the corner of the screen. It ended, and I was time for the next show, which I like to call…
FIVE MEN IN HAMSTER COSTUMES YELLING AT EACH OTHER. These hamster costumes only covered half of their body, so from under the stage, their hands controlled the hamster costume’s hands. This girl quieted all of the men down and started a three-count beat. With each beat, she named a random color (“Midori! Aka! Chai!”) and in the next three beats, one of the Hamster Dudes (TM) had to name three foods that were of those three respective colors. This went on and on until one of the Hamu-Foo’s couldn’t think of any food, and everyone else started yelling at him. By the end of the show, this one guy missed so many food names that he was smashed though a giant plastic cat’s mouth at high speed, with cake frosting smothering his face. My sister even persuaded her friends to take a look at this.
Then it was time for THE BATTLE OF THE ASSISTANT DIRECTORS, which I think was the actual name of the show. The assistant directors (AD) of each show on the network were competing in some sort of “Land of the Lost” elimination game show, where in each round someone fell down from being spun around too much.
In the first round, four contestants were spun around really fast in these chairs while being presented with a Roman or Japanese symbol. When the chairs finally stopped, they had to walk along this catwalk, push a button at the end, and say what the symbol was. But since everyone was dizzy, they all fell off of the catwalk into some weird white powder (Anthrax? Guh-huh-huh) below. Nothing can be more fun than watching dizzy Japanese ADs coated in white powder and trying to pronounce “R.”
The second round was like tug-of-war. With their hands tied behind their backs, two contestants had to wrap a rope around themselves. Whoever wrapped half of the rope first and touched the flag in the middle won. Of course, this too was very hard for all of them, as they still had Anthrax all over themselves and they kept tripping over the rope and landing flat on their faces. Ouch.
The third one was a test of STRENGTH~! and ENDURANCE~! Four contestants were lying on this this giant glass pane, which started to tilt vertically. The weirdos had to stick onto the thing as best they could, trying not to fall into the pit of balloons, angered seabass, and sharks with laser beams on their heads below. I didn’t watch the whole thing, because without warning, the TV station switched to…
THE STUPID CHINESE GUY TALKS ABOUT WHAT HE THINKS IS NEWS! Which I didn’t watch.
Well, the moral of the story is, Japanese TV is the only reason I plug the TV cable into the wall. And also, there are better ways to experience pure idiocy without taking drugs, especially on 4/20.