Takeshi's Castle

A few days ago I wrote an entry about a Takeshi Kitano movie being shown on TV, and then a few people wrote in comments about one of Kitano’s old TV shows from the eighties being shown in America. I was flipping through the channels tonight and caught MOST EXTREME ELIMINATION CHALLENGE (what they call the show) on Spike TV (formely TNN). So they take the footage from an old obstacle course type game show, TAKESHI’S CASTLE, and then dub it to their own liking (think WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY?). The first thing that struck me was how strange it was to see Kitano’s face looking so young, and without the scars he got from his motorcycling accident. The dubbing can be funny, but I think it would be at least as funny if not more if they just did a straight dub or put in subtitles. The reason the show ended in the late eighties was because of some sort of accident or maybe even death that occured during taping. Yuko said she once saw an NHK documentary on the show, and all the controversy that followed.