American Ninja Warrior

Cafe Society
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Did I miss something? What makes you think that this isn’t already a policy? I’m pretty sure there has been at least one competitor whose run was stopped because of an injury.

Of course, the question then becomes, would they actually show the run? Depending on the severity of the injury, they may decide not to air the run out of respect for the competitor, or because it was such a bad injury that part of the audience may not react to it well. Remember, it’s entertainment first, and a competition second.

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Max - While I’ve certainly had issues with the gross lopsidedness of the fields (which is even more inexplicable now that NBC is all but guaranteed to get even more utter shellackings in head-to-heads), I doubt it’s going to make any meaningful difference. Drake was never going to go much further…just not strong enough…while Durant looks like a major longshot to beat anyone in semis.

Don - I don’t mean just being too hurt to continue, or even slightly dinged. They should always have the option of calling it a night if they’re exhausted, or if they think the risk of injury is too great, or even if they feel they’ve done enough. As it is there’s just so much pressure to keep going, going, going, and the announcers gush over someone who pushes through the pain and never gives up and fights for every blah blah you heard what I heard. If we’re talking an emergency situation where every second counts…earthquake, wildfire, train derailment, that sort of thing…this is an appropriate mindset. For a reality show, this is ridiculous. Nobody should ever risk getting hurt for this nonsense, and if #11 is just as good as #1, I say stop at “good enough” and save your energy for the part where you need it.

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I can’t imagine that’s the case. No way they seed the head-to-head semis randomly, right?

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There could be something similar to what they have in track & field called an “honest effort rule” - they have to try to complete every event at 100% effort, as opposed to “backing off” so they can be rested for an upcoming event. Such a rule in ANW would make it easier to edit the shows; obviously someone whose run was near the end and knew they had clinched a spot in the top 12 so they could intentionally blow off the fifth obstacle can’t be shown as running early in the episode.

Another reason they wouldn’t quit in the middle of a run: there may be a “Ninja mentality” of “buzzer or nothing.”

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Phew, I am glad that these damn semis races are going to start next week. This is one of those deals where there’s a lot of contestants I’m hoping I don’t see again this season. Quallies, in the absence of any time for compelling stories, has come across more as a celebration of banality than anything.

Typified by tonight’s commercial tie-in, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was a pretty big fan of them in the late 80’s-early 90’s, with the goofy fourth wall-breaking cartoon and fun beat-‘em-ups. Even though I haven’t had any interest in the latest incarnation, I understand that not everything is meant for me (same reason I never raised a stink over Barney), and a TMNT-themed ANW is a workable idea. But you need to actually do something with it. Remember the Minions’ take on Spinning Bridge? Here we get… a really short opening skit, a doctored logo, and… differently-colored water in an obstacle we’ve all seen before. That’s just too superficial.

Other notes:

If you needed any more evidence that cutting the time down does not adequately cut down the BS, the goddam CHAAAAANTS tonight should nail that shut. Good lord, it was like they were trying to make up for USA vs. The World. :scream:

I don’t think naming a child Leonardo is any kind of deal. It’s just the Italian version of Leonard, which is hardly exotic, and it can be shortened to “Leo” (and frequently is in every incarnation of TMNT I’ve ever experienced), which is even more mundane. Heck, for a whole generation Leonardo means a certain famous actor far more than any cartoon character.

Boy, I guess all that dancing like a goof really was a one time thing and that “LEAVE ME THE [bad word] ALONE, [bad word]!” he gave in response to you endlessly nagging him to do it again wasn’t just ribbing, huh? :roll_eyes:

I know mom had good intentions, but gushing “You got the first obstacle, I’m so proud of you!” isn’t the kind of thing anyone should be saying on national television. Just… just big a risk that someone’s going to get the wrong idea.

I mentioned before how having a serious medical condition or being at risk of dying a very long time ago doesn’t qualify as an Acceptable Story. This week we got even something far lamer, having blotchy skin a very long time ago. :woman_facepalming: I mean, what next? Getting really bad diarrhea at age 5 after eating too much Halloween candy??

I’m honestly bewildered as to what passes for a “jinx” nowadays. Here’s what happened: female contestant (there’s is no way I’m remembering any names at the damn pace this is going), TMNT fan, doesn’t look especially strong above the waist. She’s on #4, Kite Surfer, the one before the supposedly tie-in obstacle. Near the end Eyes mentions that she has a collection of Turtles when she takes the plunge. That’s it. At NO POINT did Eyes ever say anything about her completing the obstacle, which is what “jinx” is supposed to freaking mean! :angry: Sheesh…

David was here…along with a few friends. :grimacing: There’s a threshold where you have to cut the damn mike, and that is “giving me nasty flashbacks to Lance Pekus’ daughter”.

I’d like to see the whole Bergstrom family tree. This sounds like a genuinely interesting clan.

Daniel Osmer vs. Kevin Tirado (3WA) - Tirado took a quick dip on #2 Flying Shelf Grab. Osmer got to the end and…took a bow. He couldn’t even pretend to care. Good on him. :clap:

Dawn DePaolo vs. Esparanza Aharca - Well, this duo was certainly in no hurry to see quallies end. Slow 'n steady through the first, slower 'n steadier through the shelves, where Aharca dismounts first. That would be her sole highlight as she makes it about halfway through Beehive before plummeting. DePaolo needs to finish the obstacle to win, and she’s really slow at this point, so of course she totally nails it. She promptly calls it a night, and we already knew the women on the bubble didn’t care, so no surprise here. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Semifinals were pretty fun. Happy to see Mady Howard advance. Also, I rather like that the top two losers get to advance. Nice bit of fairness, that.

I did not like that they are apparently counting these buzzers. I don’t think hitting a buzzer on this 6-obstacle “semi final” course is anywhere near the accomplishment that hitting a 10-obstacle “city finals” buzzer was. How many women ever managed that? I know Kacy for sure, Flex almost certainly, but who else? I’m not adding any of these semi finals buzzers to that list.

The race at the end for the safety pass took my breath away. I almost immediately started laughing out loud and then didn’t stop for the entire run. Just could not believe what I was seeing.

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Considered doing a complete rundown of the matches; decided it was way too much work. Might have more to say about this episode later. For now, general musings.

I know I’m not the only one who noticed that other than the Safety Pass match (which was a thrill ride and showcased just how frighteningly dominant Kaden Lebsack has become), there was absolutely zero competitive drama. There was a grand total of one match which I could even classify as a runaway (the loser got hopelessly stranded a bungee and survived until his opponent hit the buzzer); all the rest were victory-lap walkaways, speed flameouts on Bungee Road, or distance slaughters. Remember, NBC wants nail biters at the buzzer, not for it to be wire-tight the first 90% of the way and then one of them crashes. There’s a reason they Heaven and Hells don’t make the highlight reel.

So what happened? Well, all you really need to do is compare it to the ANWJ courses, which, notably, do not have four damn armbusters back to back. Even if you’re picking from the best, very few men and vanishingly few women (would like to take the opportunity to say that Taylor Greene freaking rules :grin:) are going to be able to get through such a brutal grind. And I know why NBC did this…it was the only way to keep things close! I know that big gaps in skill are magnified on the speed/footwork obstacles! But overtaxing the arms doesn’t mean a sugar finish at the buzzer, it means that both contestants fail to finish at all, meaning that the outcome was already decided, completely killing any excitement. I should also mention that the seedings…which were a vastly needed improvement, don’t get me wrong…worked to exacerbate the situation, all but guaranteeing numerous matches where both contestants don’t have the juice to go the distance and turning match into a race-to-#5 scenario.

Meh. Evrirunizzareis has three more chances to impress me, but goldangit, I liked the old siffies better. Yes, everything I’ve railed on about them still stands, but at least I got to see the contestants and remember who they are. The idea of watching some hapless bottom seed get chewed up by Kai Beckstrand for 30 seconds and that’s all we see of him the whole year rubs me the wrong way. Other than the big names, I still barely know who anyone is, let alone how they did. I think Roo Yori won? And I guess Chris Digangi lost?

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Kacy did it once.

Jesse Graff never did, coming heartbreakingly close over and over again, including getting further than anyone else on a course that literally no one finished.

Then Flex and Michelle Warnky both did it on what was (no offense to them) clearly an unusually easy course.

So, three total.

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A couple complaints and a couple – what’s the opposite of complaints? Praise? Let’s start with the praise:

  1. I am loving this reduced emphasis on runner profiles, as well as the way they’re handling the profiles (more of a focus on training and stuff related to the sport).

  2. That race between Kaden and Kai was absolutely legendary and incredibly fun to watch.

The complaints:

  1. We’re missing the element of suspense. Remember when a competitor would make it to, say, obstacle 8 before falling, and then we’d have to wait until the end of the show to see if that was good enough to advance? With the old format, the entire run was suspenseful because we didn’t know if the person would make it to the next round. But as soon as one person falls, the run becomes boring.

  2. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: AGE BRACKETS. The races that were the most competitive and fun to watch were the ones between two people who were close to one another in age. Instead having a 1-24 men’s seed and a 1-8 women’s seed, I would like to say a 1-12 boy’s seed and 1-12 men’s seed, as well as a 1-4 girl’s seed and 1-4 women’s seed.

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Oh, I forgot another complaint: the announcers spoiling the most exciting moments of the show. Other than that nail-biting race at the end, the most exciting moments were probably the 40-year old beating a guy significantly younger than him and the woman that finished the course. But because of the announcers repeatedly saying “We’ll see if these guys are the first father-son duo to make it to Vegas” (despite there being another father-son duo that they barely mention) and “She could be the first female rookie to hit two consecutive buzzers” (which is a comment they’ve never made any other time a female rookie hit a buzzer in qualifying), you knew what the outcome would be before they even ran. And now I’m seeing that ANW has announced another spoiler – I’m not even going to say this one here, because I’m so irritated at having heard it that I certainly don’t want to spread the message any further than it already has. But I would love for some shocking thing to happen without any heavy foreshadowing beforehand so that I could actually be properly astonished.

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Yeah, that was one of the most exciting things in the history of ANW. Unfortunately, this format, with its seeding, is just not really set up to have many such races. And the course is, frankly, a bit uninteresting.

I almost feel like the best solution would be to have the main ANW show go back to the old format, but have an all-racing special side episode with an actual prize. Get rid of the all star special and skills competition and have a 32-person seeded race tournament.

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This episode was really fun… lots of actually close races, the best teens still seem to be dominating but a fair number of the vets advanced as well.

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Sean Bryan continues to get WWWA’d. I’m used to that. But Jamie Rahn? Come on, him alone makes the run worth watching. Plus he was up against Pippel, who posted the fastest time of the night. That’s double the reason to show the run, but no, they WWWA’d it.

It’s frustrating to see so many WWWAs because not only is each run half as long as the old style city finals runs, but each run covers two different people. That means it’s only a quarter of the time!

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I absolutely agree, this was the best episode in a long time. So many wonderful moments: the number 23 seed ahead of the number 2 seed for almost their whole race, David Campbell and Evan Andrew both finishing the course, Joe Moravsky’s insane save on hopscotch, the Beast beating a kid 20 years younger than him, Verdale Benson putting up such a good performance against a kid 24 years younger, the number 7 women’s seed beating the number 2 women’s seed, Rachel DeGutz’s first buzzer, a rookie beating Josiah Pippel to get the safety pass, the announcers saying Najee would retire if this was his last race and then it actually WASN’T (usually when they say that, it is). I just loved this episode!

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Doing my best to keep up…

If NBC wanted more exciting/competitive/tight matches, it’s not only not working, it’s giving us the exact opposite. I’m seeing again and again that even very good contestants simply do not have the juice for a full-tilt sprint with not only, I remind you, four armbreakers in a row, but where the last one is especially taxing. In TNW/NvN, the emphasis was on speed, meaning that there were plenty of footspeed, agility, and full-body tasks. Except for the 9-obstacle slugfests, you rarely saw someone fall due to fatigue. Now not only is it so commonplace as to be expected, Slingshot is eating these people alive. And that’s not only killed all the race-to-the-buzzer drama, it’s made these matches way too predictable. Verdale Benson/Jonathan Godbout was a prime example. It was soooooo close…for the first three obstacles. Then Benson started flagging, and the moment Godbout touched down on Hopscotch, I knew he had it in the bag. MWB vs. Emily Gardiner was an even better example, where one of the most dominant women ever in match events got the early lead, but Gardiner passed her on Beehive, and I knew there was nowhere for her opponent to go but out. There was one match…one…where the contestant who finished Hopscotch first lost, Luke Dillon vs. Ramcis Valdez. (They led with that for some reason.) The rest of the time it was game over.

I still don’t understand what the point of putting this in semis is. To suddenly go from da faddes da fastest to this is jarring (and I imagine the newly match-ified Stage 2 is going to be even more so). Is this show really in such a bad financial situation that they have no choice but to smash all their ideas together on the cheap and with a truncated time slot? You’d think they’d be rolling in it after giving so little prize money over the years. Even more so that reality TV is at a premium due to the strike.

Random notes:

Sean Bryan got hurt again. It wasn’t serious, he’ll be around for Stage 1, but it’s not a good sign that he leaves in pain so often. Uncomfortable shades of Zion Williamson.

I think it’s a rule that whenever the profile emphasis what an incredible body a contestant has, that’s a stone-cold lock that he’s not moving on. Kinda like this show’s version of the “Madden Curse”.

James McGrath looked great, the only oldtimer who really impressed me. It’s like he refused to fall.

Dunno what the hell happened in the Safety Pass match. Josiah Pippel should’ve run away with it.

And now NBC is doing the “There definitely will be a million dollar winner!” thing again… I guess they decided they’re just going to do it every time. Don’t like this, obviously, but I guess they’re trying to ensure that viewers don’t lose interest. That doesn’t sound like a good sign to me.

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I’m starting to think that the structure of the season guarantees it.

My first reaction to stage 2 being head-to-heads was thinking back to various seasons were only a handful of people even made it to stage 2. So I started thinking that maybe stage 1 would be easy enough to send a bunch of people through, so that there would be enough warm bodies to make stage 2 worth it. As opposed to three head-to-head runs and then boom, on to stage 3.

But if that many people go to stage 3, maybe it’s not a matter of them needing to get to stage 4. Maybe the two people in stage 3 who do the best automatically go to stage 4, even if they don’t complete it. And then maybe whoever finishes stage 4 first with no time limit wins the million.

Probably none of that speculation is accurate. Just what I was thinking about when they said stage 2 was head-to-head and then they reiterated that somebody wins the million.

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I doubt that American Ninja Warrior would make a big change in the vein of “Maybe the two people in stage 3 who do the best automatically go to stage 4, even if they don’t complete it. And then maybe whoever finishes stage 4 first with no time limit wins the million.” Thus far, they have never made a major change to the format of the show without announcing it beforehand and hyping it up a fair amount. Head-to-head races on Stage 2 is Exhibit A.

Here’s my guess: Stage 1 will work like it did in the women’s championship, where the farthest-the-fastest non-finishers will advance in addition to the finishers. They’ll probably need to do a rule like that in order to ensure an even number of competitors for the races, and some method of seeding.

Once they get a certain number of finishers to stage 3, they can return to business as usual. Simply having more competitors on stage 3 tends to mean that somebody (often multiple somebodies) completes the course and goes on to stage 4. And then, all it takes is one person qualifying for stage 4 who has a really strong rope climb.

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I wonder how having Vegas Stage 2 being head-to-head is going to affect the Safety Pass, which, in the pass, could be used on either Stage 1 or 2. Is it just good on Stage 1? Does it carry over to Stage 3 now? Does using it on Stage 2 mean that competitor gets a second run, and if so, who would it be against? Or perhaps it would be a solo run, in an attempt to get a “fastest non-finisher” time of some sort?

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I’m chuckling at the thought of somebody winning a head-to-head on stage 2, but then their opponent pulls out the safety pass and they have to rerun the same race.

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Oh yeah, something I hadn’t considered. Since there are definitely going to be head-to-heads in Stage 2, what are the producers doing to ensure that there will not be any male vs. female matches, which is a total no-go for all kinds of reasons? The only way to really do that would be a guaranteed field after Stage 1… in essence, treat it like the old siffies. And of course that means that at least a few women will make it to Stage 3, and by extension the final day, making naffies less sausagefactorious (I kinda like how that sounds :grin:) than it was even two seasons ago.

This just tells me why sports are better when they’re not saddled with expectations. When it was just Jessie Graff with occasional flashes from Meagan Martin, and everyone understood it was just Jessie Graff with occasional flashes from Meagan Martin, having lots of men in naffies was absolutely no sweat. Now NBC has a Strong Women narrative going, and they need to have bodies in there no matter what.

I…I dunno. Maybe it works, but I’m thinking there are much simpler, fairer ways for NBC to get what they want. I still don’t understand whey they couldn’t just tweak NvN a little.