It just goes to show you, you should do what you love and makes you happy and not what society deems the more important job.
Actually, this is how it works when they get to Mount Midoriyama. I don’t think any American has ever made it past stage 3 and maybe only one even finished stage 2. (And he crapped out in qualifiers this year-but his GF is still in it as noted above-GO KACY!). Once they get to Vegas, the time limits kick in.
I know it’s trivial but one thing I cannot get over bugging me is that the course is literally translated as “Mount Green Mountain”. Either “Mount Midori” or “Midoriyama” would be fine but “Mount Midoriyama” hurts my brain.
Yeah, I used to watch the Japanese show. I bet if those guys watched the American version they would wet their pants laughing.
My kids and I used to love watching the double feature of the Japanese original (Sasuke) and Ultimate Banzuke, another Japanese athletic show. I agree with the posters here who want less stories and more competition, that’s one of the great things about the original. They break it up with some interesting characters trying the course, and some of the competitors’ stories, but nowhere near as tedious as the American show. I miss those shows.
We just started watching a couple episodes of the American version and like it well enough, but it seems to take forever to get to the competition part. We’ll give it a few more episodes though, just because it is interesting.
I generally enjoy this show, but I can watch 90% of it via DVR on 2x or even 3x speed and not feel like I’ve missed anything.
They did a Americans vs Japanese dhow - even though some on the Japanese team made it all the way to the end the Americans won.
something any given Sunday something
For the finals some stages are timed
Brian
Actually, Kane Kosugi (Japanese-American) made it to the Final Stage of season 8 of the original Japanese version (Ninja Warrior/Sasuke). No one has made it to the Final Stage of ANW, although Brian Arnold fell on the last obstacle of stage 3.
The major differences between Sasuke and ANW:
[ol]
[li]Sasuke was held twice a year, while ANW is once per year.[/li][li]Sasuke was held in one day with 100 competitors total, while ANW has regional qualifiers, and the Vegas finals (“Mt. Midoriyama”) is held over two nights.[/li][li]Sasuke was broadcast as a TV special in one day, while ANW is stretched out over many weeks.[/li][/ol]
I saw Makoto Nagano and Yuuji Urushihara (the last two Sasuke grand champions) test run the ANW qualifying course in 2010. It was obvious that, back then, the ANW course was sized for American competitors, as Nagano was not even close to reaching one of the obstacles that many of the competitors had no trouble with. It’s not surprising that the Japanese guys got crushed by the Americans on the Vegas course.
This is I think inspired by the recent tendency of people to refer to Mount Fuji as “Mount Fujiyama,” which is stupid, essentially the equivalent of saying “Mount Mount Fuji.”
I felt very sorry for the small Asian guy this week (I think his name was Yan- can’t google it right now) because he was done in by his armspan. Had his arms been as long as the other contestants he’d probably have easily cleared the rails/rings.
They went out of their way to illustrate just how “old” 52 is. Actual examples:
“That’s older than Lincoln was when he became president! That’s older than Wilford Brimley was on COCOON! That’s 17 years older than me!”
Yeah, we get it. 52. It’s older than most contestants. It’s not “old for the Earth”. Yes, it’s impressive a 52 year old guy did it, but it’s impressive when anybody does it.
I always like it when the ultra gimmicky guys fail, like the one in the diaper and the baby bonnet. The guy who was shirtless and in tight jeans wasn’t quite as gimmicky but I can’t imagine that’s a good outfit to do the course in.
I think I’m going to try out next year. I just need to lose a pound or 50 and maybe go to the gym. I’ve already got my hat picked out, and that’s the hard part.
Disappointed only two made it to stage 3, and neither finished.
But tonight’s USA vs the world (ok, Japan and Europe) was interesting, where 4 people made it through stage 3 (including Brian Arnold).
On stage 4 (a 70ft rope climb) Europe beat the US by 0.3 seconds - it just so happens that the US guy missed the buzzer the 1st time he tried to hit it, and that was likely the difference.
Brian
Thought tonight’s was a lot of fun. I really do enjoy this show.
Yep. It’s the same feel-good filler garbage that ruined the reboot of American Gladiators. They even went so far as to cut actual competition events from the show and say “watch this fun action-packed gladiatorial combat event on our website so we can tell you more about this week’s competitor’s grandma’s struggle with diabetes!”
I enjoy the show from the standpoint of watching the competitors try to run the course. I am amazed and stunned by some of the submission videos. I get excited and root and cheer for them to do well.
However, the editing and pacing of the show is dreadful. First off, I HATE previews. At least they don’t show parts of the person’s actual run in their previews. But they offset that by showing the profiles, and they’re so damn repetitive. They run snippets and comments as previews, then run them in full before the chosen competitors.
What makes this especially annoying is they take all the time to profile this one competitor who may or may not do well, then we go to commercial, and when we return, they montage three others who did just as well. Why didn’t they deserve to have their run shown?
That part annoys me especially because they don’t just use that in the qualifying rounds. No, they were still running “while you were away” during the stage 1 Finals. GAH! I think if someone gets all the way to Finals, they should get their run fully televised.
(What’s worse, during the America vs the World segment this week, several of the Japanese competitors got this treatment. Yes, they struggled on the run and went out early, but come on.)
And then there’s Matt Iseman’s perpetual grunting. God that gets old. “Coming up - I’m going to grunt my way through this whole intro package.”
Lots of the events are upper body intensive. Women in general are not as capable in that category. Plus, she’s only 5 feet tall. Size is definitely an issue on some of the obstacles. There’s reach elements. There’s the jumping spider, where you have to jump off a trampoline and do the splits and wedge between two walls. The walls start wider and get narrower the deeper you go. If you are short, you have to jump farther to be able to reach the walls. One of the obstacles she crossed was a series of vertical poles they had to climb between that were spaced different amounts. One gap was 6 feet across. She had to jump where other competitors could reach out and grab it.
Yes, she’s a gymnast who only weighs 100 lbs, so she’s strong and well-coordinated. Compare male gym events vs female gym events, the men do upper body intensive events like parallel bars, pommel horse, iron rings. Girls do balance beam. Yes, they do uneven bars, which is their most upper body intensive element, but the guys program is more heavily slanted that way.
Even on events they both do, vault and floor, there are differences. Mens floor exercise is silent and is going to have pommel horse style routines on the mats. Ladies program is set to music. And vaulting, the ladies are almost always not getting as big of air. It was a huge deal in the last Olympics where one of the US competitor girls was a vault specialist, and could get huge air like the guys.
You’re missing the elements in the US version. They have qualifying rounds from 5 regions around the US, to weed down the competitors to the 100 entrants that get invited to Vegas. In the qualifying rounds, there is no time limit and they take the top 30 and then 15 competitors, whether they finish or not. They do take all finishers.
Once they get to Vegas, it’s run like the Japanese version. There are time limits on some stages, and if you fail you are eliminated.
This has roots in the early years of the American Ninja Warrior program. When it originated, it was preparing Americans and taking them to Japan for the competition. The early stages were basically training rounds. They didn’t really count except as a way to weed down the competitors.
And sorry, you are wrong, they’ve been running the show with Mt Midoriyama in Vegas for 3 years now, and nobody has made it past stage 3 until the special showdown this week. So an American network is doing it.
Yeah, certain ones I have to root against. The guy in a diaper is one. Any grown man dressed in a diaper gets points against him. (America’s Got Talent had it happen this season, too. Some singer guy came out and sang really well, wearing a diaper. He got through the first round, but I would have made a strong comment against the diaper.)
I also want for people with droopy crotched pants to trip on those saggy pants. I keep rooting for them to fail because of their pants.
The guy in the loincloth almost went out because the floppy tails nearly dragged the water.
This. It makes the show almost unwatchable for me.
This is why the Japanese version is far superior. It’s basically an hour of “next guy up”. Without all the stupid stories. It’s been a while since I watched though but I also remember the japanese show had people wearing funny costumes sometimes or am I thinking of another show?
ETA I used to LOVE American Gladiators. I used to stay up all night watching it on TBS when I would sleep over my gramps house.
I miss the characters from the original. Bring back the Octopus Man!
Yeah, that was the show. There was Tako-san, the tiny old guy who always dressed in white shorts and tank top and had a boiled octopus in one hand before he started the race. There were other guys who ran the course in their work uniforms, e.g. Shingo Yamamoto in his gas station attendant outfit, or firefighters in their Japanese firefighter orange pants. Or that oddball artist fellow who was strapped into a hang glider at the start line, jumping out of the harness a few seconds before the start horn.
I agree that the human-interest stories are a bit silly, but they don’t overly interfere with what is really a genuinely gripping athletic competition. In USA vs. the World we had…
-The continued, and fairly inexplicable, woes of the Japanese team on stages 1 and 2
-The fastest time ever on stage 1 set, and then CRUSHED
-The French guy doing a belly flop out of the rope grasper on his way to a stunningly fast time on stage 2
-FOUR people finishing stage 3, which had never before been finished, including Brian Arnold shaking off his demons to force a tiebreak, and two japanese guys finishing it for national pride, but neither one winning a point
-0.3 seconds determining the winner
-The American crowd cheering on EVERYONE, including the Europeans and Japanese
What’s not to love?
(My favorite competitor is Isaac Caldiero. I love how completely mellow he always is. He clearly tries really hard, but then at the end of the day, win or lose, he just seems like his attitude is “well, THAT happened, now back to my trailer-full-of-pot-smoke”.)
I’ll watch it from time to time. It looks really cheesy at first, but it takes some actual athleticism to get thru that course! Much better than average reality show.
But I definitely only watch this recorded so I can skip thru the nonsense and commercials.
I think the show would be more compelling if they set up 2 courses next to each other for stage 1 and had 2 people going at once, race style. The way it’s set up now they give you a 10min backstory then you watch the guy fall off the first obstacle in .02 seconds.
I also enjoyed the “water” in the Japanese version better. Just holes dug in the ground and filled with water. Kinda dirty and muddy. Seemed a bit more perilous. Here we have padded pools filled with mineral water or something.