The fact that so many people actually practice the obstacles obviously makes a huge difference. How often does someone fail to make it up the warped wall these days?
When I learned that Lionsgate was releasing DVDs of the first ever UFC tournaments, which I could rent from Blockbuster Video (ah, those were the days), I was thrilled. Because I wasn’t there at the beginning, and for the first time ever I could see and hear these sports landmarks in their raw incarnate, not filtered through 100 layers of hype and bias and skewed perceptions and bluster and ranting and BS. This was a big, big deal for me. It’s the same reason I would be thrilled at a release of the first full season of American Idol…no “best of” or “greatest hits” or “funniest moments” garbage, the actual, uncut, unblemished first season from start to finish. When I first heard that Fox was announcing a singing competition, I never dreamed that I ever would have any interest in it. I can decide for myself what’s great and terrible, thank you.
I mention this now because that is the exact same feeling I get watching the ANW telecast, which NBC has apparently gone full-bore reality TV with (which I both depressingly predictable and more than a little frustrating). They decide what is interesting or compelling, they decide who is deserving of our attention, they decide what matters. And I really, really do not like this, for the same reason I don’t like “best of” compilations or fixed set lists in music games. What I like is very rarely what “everyone else” likes. Good lord, have I ever said one positive thing about the selection process, judging, or elimination structure of any one of these things ever? Besides, anyone who’s watched the original (Sasuke, tomodachis) knows that goofballs and weirdos and lovable losers every bit a part of the experience as the Brian Arnolds and Isaac Caldiearos. If NBC were to market the whole event, start to finish, no cuts, no stories (except maybe as a DVD feature), no “while you were away” tripe, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Ah well.
Oh, one thing that would improve things considerably, and really wouldn’t take too much effort, would be if the announcers didn’t make such a ginormous elephantine hyper combo deal about the prelims (“city qualifying”). Yes, Brian Arnold regaining some confidence is nice, but let’s wait until he’s made it to Stage 3 before declaring him baaaaaaaaack. Likewise, trumping up Jon Stewart being the oldest ever competitor to get his foot in the door strikes me as at best wrongheaded and at worst outright patronizing. A simple “all right” or “good” will suffice, guys; save the big cheerleading for the actual contest.
Megan Martin looked very solid. The best way I could put it was that she was the exact opposite of Shuks, completely in control and knowing exactly what to do to get through. The thing I’ve noticed is that raw athleticism won’t get you very far, you have to know how to move your arms to get that ring or peg where you want it to, how to hit the trampoline to reach that net, just the right amount of swing to nab that 6-inch bar. That’s what Martin had over every other female competitor we saw that night.
amaguri - I know. I’d actually think a documentary about one of these ascetics would be fascinating. What would convince someone with the physical talents to make at least a decent living in a professional sport to instead select a once-a-year event where the slightest misstep ends his hopes and there’s a near-100% chance he’ll never make a penny?
BeepKillBeep - I agree completely that no one should claim American Ninja Warriortude without clearing every stage. The prelims (the “city qualifying” and “city semifinals”), however, are simply a weeding-out process. It’s not necessary to clear either to make it to the big dance. And of course there are wild cards, so even finishing near the top isn’t strictly required. I don’t need to see Brent Steffensen or Paul Kasemir running the bunny slope for the sixth time. They’ve earned their place. If they suffer a shocking failure in Stage 1, so be it. Wouldn’t be the first, won’t be the last.
Here’s a question that someone might know the answer to… how far ahead of time are the city qualifies/finals filmed?
I assumed that they would roll into Kansas City, set up all their stuff, then film the city qualifiers one night, then film the city finals the next night, and then drive away, and then the actual TV show is broadcast weeks or months later. But more than once there have been talking head interviews before the city finals which talk about having been seen on TV in the qualifying rounds.
There’s no way that the qualifying rounds are actually broadcast before the city finals are filmed, is there?
As you suspect, the qualifiers are filmed one day and typically the next day the finals are filmed (barring some reason they can’t be).
If I remember correctly, they taped in Kansas City the weekend of April 17-18. I think they had two or three separate Friday sessions that you could get tickets for, and then the City Finals were the next night. I’ll see if I can dig up and post some links from the KC Star later when I’m not posting from my phone.
Here is an article from the weekend they taped in KC:
Kacy is on tonight. If they show her early she didn’t do so well - I’m guessing if she finished she well air last or nearly so.
The first person to finish was at about 45 minutes into the program.
Brian
Though even if she didn’t finish they will likely air her last
Brian
Good episode. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love that I can cheer for everybody. I love seeing people who improve, like Jonathan Parr, it is what the show is all about. You fall, get better, go further and keep pushing until you win.
Glad for Brett, but too bad about Kacy. She looked very nervous and I think it threw her off.
Last year I kept saying that Kacy couldn’t possibly make it past this obstacle because her arms are too short. Looks like I was finally right. Glad to see Brent S on top of his game again, and that opera singing guy does seem like the real deal.
Gah…had a longer post, but I’m tired. Thoughts:
Is it just me, or did the level of competition look a bit down this week? I didn’t see anything particularly challenging about Tilting Slider; if anything, it looked a lot less prone to fluke knockouts than, say, Rolling Escargot or Giant Cycle. There were 15 finishers, which looks decent, but considering that 38 made it through last week, it definitely looks below average.
And while I don’t particularly mind widely different results in the cities (they’re all doing different things, after all, and you never know who’ll show up), I’d rather NBC accentuate the positive more…i.e. not show so many 1st and 2nd obstacle washouts. Remember when it was two or three Quintuple Steps fails just to show how hard this was, most of the strong contenders, and the rest of it was in the middle? I guess this is just an unfortunate consequence of the obsessive focus on “interesting stories” (read: treacly, maudlin, emotionally loaded stories, which I, incidentally, find boring as hell) that the confluence of good story and good run is just so rare. I mean, other than what-coulda-been, what kind of “interesting story” can you pull up about Brent Steffensen? Lorin Ball? David “Flip” Rodriguez? Kevin Bull? Noah Kaufman, he’s a successful highly-paid professional who’s built like an armored truck, is there anything even remotely sad about his life?
One unsettling trend I’m seeing is a lot more focus given to the women. And look, it’s great how far they’ve come, it’s awesome how everyone competes on the exact same playing field, but…let’s face it, aside from Kacy Catanzaro, they stunk up the joint. Which there’s no shame in, of course (most of the men undoubtedly did the same), but if you’re going to show like 10% of the runs, you need to focus on the good efforts a little more. If you want a “girl power” competition, make an Americanized verison of Kunoichi. I’d be a fan of that from day one.
As for Catanzaro…that cargo-to-line thing looked trickier than what she was used to, and honestly, I’m not sure Megan Martin would’ve done much better. She’s getting a wildcard…c’mon, NBC isn’t brain dead (well, okay, maybe the announcers :). But losing a lot of face time in city qualifying is going to hurt, especially since they could’ve hyped up a possible repeat to the moon. Like BeepKillBeep, I have to wonder if there was simply way too much pressure on her, especially after being trumped up as a national hero and inspiration and superhuman etc.
Have some comments about Akbar Gjabaiamila (damn, I think I’m going to have more trouble with that than “Kyrzezewsky”); will get to them some other time. I said I was tired.
I liked the gymnast who was totally pissed at not getting an automatic spot (guess he didn’t have a good enough story). It was good to see that a short person could finish all these obstacles. Also, I wish they would take it down a notch on Kacy. Give the other women who finished qualifiers a little credit too.
I wrote a blog article a while back about Sasuke. They had a Sasuke park for the first time last year, after TBS picked up the rights for everything and started promotion again. I took some kids from the fitness program I coach. Slightly scaled down versions of the obstacles, but still damn hard. Got to meet some of the competitors in person too, since I was there on opening day.
Well, that’s now officially on my list of places to visit.
Now to find a conference in Japan… 
NBC skipped a week of coverage for whatever dumb reason, so really nothing to do at the moment but speculate on possible improvements.
Um, okay, first off…I’m hoping to hell that this doesn’t fall into the reality TV trap of becoming SO outrageously glutted with glurge and sap and tripe that it becomes unwatchable. It trickled dangerously close with Kacy Catanzaro and all the stories about cancer survivors and accident survivors and special needs kids. I’ve seen Dancing With The Stars, which used to be a servicably entertaining nonserious piece of fluff that I watched and commented on avidly (no, really!), gradually mutate into an utterly unwatchable overwrought nightmare that looks like an Onion parody. Same with The Voice; once the wins rolled in and it became all judges’ dicksizing all the time, that was all she wrote. My greatest hope is that after enough time passes and the “interesting stories” happen enough times that they become old hat, NBC will stop overhyping them so much, or at least find new stories to hype. Please, please, prettyprettyprettyplease don’t let this become just another show I used to like.
Now then…something’s been gnawing me for a long time, and the “bye week” put it into sharp relief: how pathetically small this whole thing is. You have six or seven cities, from which 15 competitors each get to make the big dance (of which we’ll get to see a third of them if we’re really lucky), and a few wildcards. Then we have the dependable bloodbath that is Stage 1 played out over two weeks, and then one more week for the entire rest of the shebang. In other words, a fairly small buildup leading to a blink-and-you-missed it conclusion. Of which there’s one per year.
That’s fine for Japan, where there are a whole bunch of other weirdo game shows out there, but ANW occupies a unique niche in American culture, and it could be, should be a whole lot bigger. So let me propose some modifications, and then you can give a detailed breakdown of why they’re stupid ideas and won’t work. 
Start with qualifying. I really think it should be more forgiving, mainly because I don’t want a strong contender to get 5 seconds of face time because he made one uncharacteristic slipup on the quintuple steps, or, worse, fail to qualify because the one obstacle that he couldn’t deal with came at a bad time (i.e. what happened to Catanzaro). The time to be brutal and merciless begins at Stage 1. Listen, the prelims have no hardass credentials. That ship sailed when they allowed the top 30/15 to advance whether they finished or not, and then got blown up by a torpedo with the existence of wildcards. So for “city qualifying” and “city finals”, allow one miss, and for ranking purposes only count the completed obstacles. So if, say, Catanzaro successfully cleared Bungee Road and Warped Wall, she’d get credit for 5 obstacles and the time on the 5 she cleared. Workable, no? And tell me that someone gritting out an upper-body intensive obstacle despite carrying several pounds of dead weight and with slippery hands wouldn’t be good drama. There should also be more qualifiers…40 after the first round and 20 after the second would work just fine.
There should also be a fairer system for determining scheduled runs, so I’m also in favor of some kind of tryout program prior to the prelims. Not quite sure what would be in it, but in a nutshell, if you show you’re one of the best, you get your shout without having to walk on and hope. Think of it as, mmm, the old Qualifying School the PGA Tour used to have. Sure to always be intensely competitive…some great TV here!
And the actual competition (What’s it called again? The “Finals Finals”?), I could see a little more leniency here, too. How’s this: Each competitor gets one do-over which can be used in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd stage. If they fail, they can decide whether to attempt the stage again. However, if they use it at any time, they cannot move on to stage 4; if they complete stage 3, that’s it, game over, drive home safely. It would still take absolute perfection to achieve Total Victory, but those who aren’t there can still test themselves, still possibly have an inspiring run, still provide entertainment. Be honest, wouldn’t you have liked to see Brian Arnold take another crack at stage 3 after getting oh-so-close? And if he did, wouldn’t THAT have given us an intriguing storyline for the next season?
And hey, in addition to our own Kunoichi, how about a youth contest? Or one with only special needs/handicappeds? A college one? Bottom line, something this cool or amazing deserves to have a lot more than this does; it shouldn’t be tucked away into a little niche spot in the summer.
They took a week off to broadcast the finals of a real sport. (Either the Stanley Cup or the NBA, not sure which was on NBC.)
The three rounds are called:
Round 1: City Qualifying
Round 2: City Finals
Round 3: Mount Midoriyama
Not a fan of any of your suggested changes. I understand the reasoning behind them; I just think they would make things worse instead of better.
Well, for what it’s worth I’ve been watching since the first full US-based season (which I think was season 4?), and the level of glurge-y human interest has remained more or less constant.
So it doesn’t look like it will fall into any traps, unless you think it’s already in that trap.
As for your other comments, I see where you’re coming from… on the other hand, part of what makes this show unique is how unforgiving it is. You spent a year training every day for seven hours and spent your family’s fortune on a ninja course in your backyard? A year’s worth of effort could be gone in an instant if you screw up the salmon ladder.
I think the human interest stories have to strike a balance… if there are none of them, then it’s just a bunch of random people we’ve never heard of competing, which I honestly think wouldn’t be that compelling. Too much of it and it gets tedious. I would like less human interest and more ninja, but I don’t find the balance as far out of whack as one might immediately think.
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I think the human interest stories have to strike a balance… if there are none of them, then it’s just a bunch of random people we’ve never heard of competing, which I honestly think wouldn’t be that compelling. Too much of it and it gets tedious. I would like less human interest and more ninja, but I don’t find the balance as far out of whack as one might immediately think.
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Gosh, I could not disagree more.
NO popular sporting event bothers with much in the way of human interest stuff. The NFL doesn’t do this, MLB doen’t, the NHL doesn’t, the NBA doesn’t, and those are multi-jillion dollar businesses all the same. There’s a little bit of it but very little indeed, and it’s usually only if and when it cannot be ignored, or as ninety seconds of filler in a 3-hour broadcast. What real sports organizations understand is that the sports provide all the drama. It’s the competition itself, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and the storylines grow from there, organically. You’ll get villains and heroes, underdogs and overwhelming favourites, comebacks and collapses, just by running the sport. You don’t need to spend eight goddamned minutes profiling Kacy Canizaro (sp?) to see and know she’s a huge underdog who did an amazing thing. Let the competition happen, let us see her finish a course. Provide statistics and facts and the stories will build themselves.
Oh, and would they please stop calling it “Mount Midoriyama.” It’s either Mount Midori or Midoriyama, for God’s sake.
I really don’t mind the occasional story, some of them are somewhat interesting. The problem is most of them are very similar. Person has personal challenge, dedicates themselves to Ninja Warrior, overcomes personal challenge. One story I did like was the one of the husband whose wife is dying. I thought that was a nice story, very touching. Overall, I agree with RickJay, let the sport dominate.
But there’s a difference… 99% of people who watch an NFL game already know a fair bit about the different teams and and players, where they’re from, etc. The NFL broadcasts themselves don’t need to give you some idea of who the different teams are because there are already massive segments of society doing so.
Suppose you were entertaining a visitor from another country who knew literally zero about the NFL, and you were going to watch an NFL game on TV, and you wanted to get them interested. You might well tell them “so, that’s Tom Brady, he’s XXX” and “that team is the Raiders, they always cheat”, etc.
Granted, you probably wouldn’t go into great length about how that particular wide receiver had lost a mother to breast cancer or something, but there has to be some reason to care about individual competitors as people. Otherwise it might just as well be “ok, next is competitor #24601…”.