American Ninja Warrior 2015

Quite true. I wonder if that’s because I believe they do the commentating in real time, but then things are edited and rearranged later, so he never knows whether any given run he’s commentating will be the first one actually seen by the viewers.

I think we all agree that Geoff Britten is an American Ninja Warrior, one of two.
So who would you choose for the 5-person USA-vs-the-world team?
Isaac and Geoff are locks.
Ian Dory made it by far the farthest of anyone else this year.
Joe Marovsky has been insanely consistent. (3 straight trips to stage 3, I don’t think anyone else has ever even made it twice?)

Fifth spot is unclear… Brian Arnold for past performance? Drew Dreschel I think made it the farthest of anyone else this year, and brings a somewhat different skill set? Kevin Bull for general charisma and well rounded talent?

“Officially” by whom? I don’t think the question is whether or not he is an ANW (I think everybody agrees that he is), but whether or not he is “the first” ANW.

If you can use your legs/feet on Area 51, I don’t see why you couldn’t climb onto the wheels in Roulette Row.

That being said, even if you did climb onto a wheel, what good would it do? How do you move around without momentum causing the wheel to turn you in the opposite direction, which (along with the fact that the wheels are about 5 feet apart at their closest points) is why nobody who got stuck on the first wheel managed to get to the second?

Officially by the show. In Sasuke the commentators would call them ninja warrior, and in later season recaps would refer back to everybody who completed Mount Midoriyama as a ninja warrior.

It won’t matter what everybody thinks if next season the commentators come out and call Caldiero the first American Ninja warrior.

A warped wall? :wink:

I think there are two possible contributors to these unfortunate occurrences. First, as mentioned, the commenting appears to be done real time (though I hold that they do some later with regards to sequencing), but the runs are edited to death, so he can’t know the order or if any of them are shown at all. Second, it’s an unfortunate side effect of the modern attentionless viewer who channel surfs. The ridiculous amount of “coming ups” is trying to build enough anticipation to fight the urge of those to leave the channel. Similarly, they assume someone just blundered into the show during that commercial break, and didn’t see any of the previous runs, so has no clue what is going on.

Hour long dramas manage to survive, mostly because I don’t think they have figured out a way to summarize where you are. But any reality programming is loaded with the “coming up” and “while you were away”, i.e. repeating the last comments before the break.

I’ve caught some of Dr. Phil’s show, and it is nearly unwatchable* just do to the editing. They show almost a minute of preview just for each commercial break. It’s insanely difficult to follow because they prime the reaction or comment that’s coming by showing it to you without the conversation lead in, then show the commercial, then come back and eventually get to that event. Drives me batty.

*The show is also often unwatchable due to the content of the problems, but that’s a separate complaint. Sometimes it would be engaging in a rubbernecking kind of way if not for the editing.

It very well could be illegal. Some obstacles have more rules about what you can do than others. Some say you can only use your hands or not use your hands. For instance, one of the rocking stone types you can’t use your hands at all, but landing on your shins is fine. Some have rules on what parts you can and cannot touch. For instance, one year it was illegal to grab the backside of the platforms on the Quintuple steps. You could touch the front or even tops of the edges, but you couldn’t grip over to the back. I would think anyone contemplating unique solutions would need to listen/read very carefully the rules given at the event.

I don’t know, but from the way NBC acts, I think they’re going to call Isaac the First American Ninja Warrior because he won the money, by their rules, that makes him the title holder. Rather than rewarding anyone who completes the course with the title.

Money. They added a prize component, so they have to differentiate who won the prize. Ergo the title goes to the prize winner.

Good question. Maybe allowing you to shift your weight, get a good jump, try a bigger swoop going backwards first. If they had one to experiment with, someone might be able to devise a strategy.

There’s no “season” in Japan. There’s a single prelim. Only 100 competitors are chosen to participate, and it’s a single one-day event. There are no byes, no second chances, no do overs, no sectionals, no regionals, no official practice courses, no nothin’. You do it, or you don’t.

From reading the thread it’s apparent that ANW is ‘Mericaned beyond belief. Not surprising, but it really isn’t even the same thing as Sasuke, which is why I think it’s kind of a good thing that it’s branded differently.

Also, NBC can bite my hairy gaijin nutsack. They say they require Flash to view videos, and they don’t make them available outside the US. I haven’t commented because I haven’t been able to watch any of the events.

Okay, I was going to wait until I could see the whole thing, but dangit, I can’t remain silent about this any longer.

This is the season American Ninja Warrior lost its innocence.

Yeah, I know, I never use that term, but it fits here.

Remember how it used to be? You’d have your ex-NFL stars and accountants and nature lovers and parkour guys (whatever happened to them, anyway?) and gymnasts and weekend warriors and hippies and cosplayers and soldiers and firefighters, and they all ran the same course, they all belonged. Yeah, there was a biggish prize, but honestly most of them had a better chance of winning a lottery. It wasn’t about winning, it was about seeing how far they could go, seeing how many buzzers they could hit, and just plain watching and being amazed. When they succeeded, we cheered; when they failed, we cheered anyway. It was, aside from endless commercials and the constant bloviating from those two clowns in the booth, a rollicking great time.

There were no foolish expectations. How could there be? This was so radical and weird no one had the slightest idea what to expect. When someone mishandled Quintuple Steps, it wasn’t disappointing, it was just the nature of the beast (which those two imbeciles in the booth made sure to remind us of ever single flippin’ time it happened).

And now only one woman makes it through City Finals, and what was once a perfectly normal result is a huge, huge letdown. And we have competitors breaking into tears. And family members watching on the sidelines doing the same. And this whole nonsense about “I’m Going To Become The First American Ninja Warrior!”, which was just a bit of good-natured posturing like “Roll Tide” or “Rock Chalk Jayhawk”, get elevated to the level of a goddam blood oath. Culminating, naturally, in Isaac Caldiero’s breathtaking triumph, which should by rights have been a moment of pure, delirious joy (and in past seasons would have been), managing to tick off nearly everybody.

Oh. Crap. Yeah. I mentioned before how I don’t follow football anymore? See, the thing about bigtime sports is that for most issues, there are a number of polarized and completely militant stances. The DH. Interleague play. Deflategate. The Heisman. Tiger Woods. Collegiates getting paid. Usually what happens is that either the sides dig in and no one ever, ever budges a micron, or else one particular stance for some reason wins out and becomes the eternal ironclad absolute truth. The, latter, incidentally, is what happened with the Patriots’ 18-1 season. In days that followed, I was stunned by how quiet the boards were about this, and I later learned was that was because the narratives were carved in stone, cast in bronze, and then wrapped in several tons of titanium sheeting. The championship is the only thing that matters, therefore the ‘72 Dolphins remain the greatest team ever, the fact that they played two fewer games means nothing nothing nothing, the regular season means nothing nothing nothing, there’s no point in attempting to measure the Patriots against any other team, they suck, ESPN is completely right to plaster Mercury Morris’ ugly mug on the present day Dolphins’ website yet again, and no one is allowed to have any problem with this, and no one is allowed to be tired about hearing about the '72 Dolphins. That was it. All this was meekly accepted by the entire NFL fandom. There was no discussion whatsoever. And I hate this. Debate is good. Opposing viewpoints are good. Seeing things from the other person’s POV is good. Having an open mind is good.

When NBC gave Isaac Caldiero a trophy declaring him the First American Ninja Warrior, they made two hard-line declarations: 1. That FANW was not simply posturing, but in fact was a title of monumental importance, a god-maker, 2. and Caldiero was it, end of story. This was also a cold slap in the face to Geoff Britten (even more so due to reality TV’s fanatical insistence on winner-take-all (which is a separate issue which I’ll deal with in another thread). Naturally the pushback was almost immediate, and some of it has taken form in the opposite-end entrenchment anyone who’s been in an argument over the DH can recognize. “I don’t care what those idiots say! Geoff Britten Is The First American Ninja Warrior and the honor is his forever and ever and he is the lord and he is the god RRRRAAAAAAGGHH!!” Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to sue over this. And of course the next natural step is to call Caldiero’s decision to go second a catastrophic mortal blunder on par with Leon Lett failing to run up the score on the Bills even further instead of the utterly trivial choice it actually was.

I mean, how messed up is that? Prior to this season no one even finished Stage 3, and now two men have gone the distance, something which was once utterly unthinkable, and instead of shouting and cheering and celebrating we’re sulking and taking bitter hard line stances, and I’m sitting here wondering what the hell happened.

On the plus side, it turns out I was completely on the money about David Rodriguez! :smiley:

I literally have no idea where you’re getting any of this. What two sides are locked in mortal debate here? Everyone agrees that it sucks for Geoff Britten. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that there are two people who deserve the title of “American Ninja Warrior”. Where’s the big dispute?

What did you predict?

Here were my pre-stage-1 predictions, btw. Pretty good:

There’s going to be an American Ninja Warrior spinoff in which they compete in teams!

I can’t wait!

That article seems misleading through snark. They link here.

That description sounds basically like “America vs the World”, but with teams made up in some manner from just American contestants.

Also, that article described Matt Iseman as a comedian, which prompted me to look him up on wikipedia. Huh, I figured he was an ex football player like Ackbar G. Nope, he’s a doctor turned comedian, writer, and TV host.

Here’s the substantive quote:

“Each one-hour episode of Team Ninja Warrior features top competitors from past seasons of American Ninja Warrior in a newly designed dual course that incorporates speed, agility, skill and strategy. Two dozen squads of three will compete in a team-to-team race against the clock and one another. The teams with the fastest cumulative times in each episode will advance to the finale, where team will be crowned Team Ninja Warrior champions.”

I guess a “dual” course probably means a side-by-side course where two people compete, as opposed to a simultaneous cooperative course.

So I guess there are 3 rounds, and 3-member teams. Each round features a head-to-head competition. Add up the total time from the 3 rounds, team with the fastest time wins?

I’m still psyched, although it sounds like my initial impression, that there would be obstacles that required two people working in tandem to overcome, was probably mistaken.

So it sounds like BattleFrog, but dialed up to 11.