They’re all worth watching, but yesterday’s episode of Avanti un Altro is especially worth a watch.
Meanwhile, with thanks to Brian M Moore, what everybody wants: The Million Pound Drop in Japanese. Mmmmm, good smell!
Iconic One Theme | Powered by Wordpress
That episode of Avanti un Altro has to be the most exciting thing I’ve seen on TV since The Cube.
Also, in case anyone’s interested, I’ll volunteer to translate the questions from the clip (and get in a bit of practice on my Japanese in the process). Choices will be listed from left to right as they appear on the bottom of the screen.
A preface for those who are unfamiliar with the quirks of the Japanese language, mostly copied from my DERO! post: Japanese has three alphabets, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic; the overly-simplified version of the distinction is that katakana is used in place of hiragana in similar situations as you might use italics in English. Kanji consists of characters borrowed from Chinese; it’s used in place of hiragana for root words in a fashion similar to the use of “&” in place of “and” in English, but kanji is used much, MUCH more frequently in Japanese than any English analogue because kanji is much less ambiguous than all hiragana. This information is key to understanding a couple of the questions.
=== Warning, spoilers below! ===
Q1: Categories are “Created in Japan” and “Long Sellers”. They chose “Created in Japan”
Q: Which of the following burgers was sold for the first time anywhere in the world by the fast food chain Lotteria?
A: Teriyaki Burger, B: Shrimp Burger, C: Cheeseburger, D: Fish Burger
Q2: Categories are “Consumer Electronics” and “Kanji”. They chose “Kanji”.
Q: Which of these kanji is used for the まま in “おままごと” (“playing house”)?
A: まえ (front), B: 母 (mother), C: 飯 (food), D: 真似 (mimicry)
Next team:
Q1: Categories are “Pets” and “Smartphones”. They chose “Smartphones”.
Q: What does the “smart” in “smartphone” mean? (Note: “Smart” here is in English phonetically spelled in katakana, the answer choices are in Japanese.)
A: Light, B: Thin, C: Smart, D: New
Q2: Categories are “Television” and “Music”. They chose “Television”.
Q: Which of these Japanese TV serial dramas broadcast in the Kanto region had the highest viewership (audience share) for their finale?
A: “Housekeeper Mita”, B: “101st Proposal”, C: ”Broken Toy Blocks”, D: “Bark at the Sun”
(Note: I’ve never heard of any of these shows and thus have no idea if I missed any puns or subtleties in the titles, I just translated them literally.)
Q3: Categories are “Husbands” and “Wives”. They chose “Wives”.
Q: According to Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company’s survey of married couples in their 20’s through 50’s, the average husband has saved up about 380,000 yen (currently about US $4,000 or UK £2600). How much has the average wife saved up?
A: About 270K yen, B: About 770K yen, C: About 1.27M yen, D: About 1.77M yen
And that’s the end of the clip. There are subsequent parts on YouTube, but I’ll wait and see if there’s any interest before I continue translating those.
Thanks for this, by the way. For some reason I assumed the burger question was going to be about McDonalds when I watched it.
By the way, there’s another version of The Million Pound Drop in Taiwan titled “歡樂智多星”, although it doesn’t seem to have been licensed from Endemol, plus it’s a bit rubbish. The one improvement is that the last question also has 3 choices, but they also have a suspicious tendency to declare an obviously wrong answer left empty to be the “correct” answer. (One question was “Which of these animals is warm-blooded?” and the show claimed the right answer was salmon!)
There’s also a Bit of a Wasted Journey-ish front game between 3 teams, although the losers get to stay on for the rest of the episode if there’s time and try again on the next game along with one new teaｍ. One of them is a blatant rip-off of Stopper Cuberidge from Tokyo Friend Park 2, one was copied from Minute to Win It, one is purely luck-based, and I don’t know what other ones there might be.
I’m disappointed that the contestants aren’t on trapdoors.
good timing, just now I’ve seen a promo for the upcoming Italian return of Money Drop
the opening night of the Sanremo Festival has scored 12,969,000 viewers (48.3% share) slightly less than last year.
Aww, I did wonder if they’d just keep extending AuA indefinitely.
So, teams start with 20 million yen … wasn’t there some kind of winnings cap at two million yen per person in Japan sometime ago – or are they somewhat confident about every team is gonna lose a good chunk in the process ? 🙂
Money Drop : also returning soon in France.
Good question! Perhaps they have to drop the excess or something.
From what I understand of the Japanese winnings cap is that the excess money is split in 2 million increments to friends and family that they bring along to the studio with them. In this case each trio brings along an extra seven people so all ten of them would get 2 million each if they won the jackpot.
They’ve scrapped the winnings limit in Japan according to the Japanese wiki article on the show.
The ep of Run For Money that aired in January had the solo winner getting 2.76 million yen, so it’s at least that much..
Quite interesting that this winning cap rule is evolving.
Also interesting – Japan seems to buy more and more international GS formats those years, quite strange (another recent example being … Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place ! http://www.nhk.or.jp/holdon/ )
In other pilot recording news..
http://www.lostintv.com/tv-show?id=411
..reads words ‘visually iconic’ – and briefly looses the will to live.
(logs off, closes down laptop, smashes head repeatedly against wall)
Christ, I’m seeing so much in the next month, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get time off for this.
Oh well, applied anyway. The excitement if witnessing something visually iconic just too much to bear.
This looks like the sort of thing someone exceptionally talented and amazing, and probably married to someone devastatingly handsome, might have had something to do with 😉
“Devastatingly handsome”?
Surely you mean “visually iconic”?
here’s how the Elio E Le Storie Tese looked like a few minutes ago on the Sanremo Festival stage
this was for the first song (“damned forever”)
http://static.blogo.it/tvblog/4/4b6/Elio-e-le-storie-tese-586×329.png
then for the second song (“the mono-note song”) they used another look.
http://static.blogo.it/tvblog/sanremo-2013-seconda-puntata-elio-e-le-storie-tese-dannati-forever-e-la-canzone-mononota/schermata-2013-02-13-a-23-20-36.png
the mono-note song won by a landslide (81% to 19%) and will be their “official” song for the rest of the Festival.
If you can read music, you can see on Elio’s shirt which note is the song all about.
I’ll translate the lyrics and post a video as soon as it becomes available