DennysDiner

2 Live Crew, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

@DennysDiner

I FUCKING LOVE DUBSTEP AND CUM!!!!!

small bug who learned to use computers and is evil. 63

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DennysDiner
@DennysDiner
belarius
@belarius
JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

The thing about the original Iron Chef

Is that it spawned what makes up like... Half of modern reality tv. The Competition Reality Show where you get a bunch of different guys who are really good at what they do and have them compete can very much be traced back to Iron Chef, even though they evolved over time. Every food network star, ever British bakeoff, every forged in fire, every weird Netflix glass blowing thing, they all started there...

AND IT'S STILL COOLER THEN ANY SINGLE ONE OF THEM

irisjaycomics
@irisjaycomics

the thing so many Competition Reality Shows don't understand is that the thing that made Iron Chef cool was its panache. it took place in a STADIUM. it was run by a guy who dressed like a FANCY PRINCE. every episode was based around the INGREDIENT-BASED WHIMS of the fancy prince, and he'd stop the entire show to explain WHY THAT INGREDIENT RULES. the challenger would get their own backstory explanation as well, to give you an idea of why the fancy prince thought they'd be fun to watch destroy themselves against the titanic might of the fancy prince's hand-picked ROYAL CUISINE GUARD.

...actually i guess what i'm saying is the thing that's missing from competition reality shows is "monarchy". like so many things, it's bad in real life, but amusing on television

belarius
@belarius

It's absolutely not an accident that the original Chairman Kaga was played by a theater actor best known for his work in productions like Jesus Christ Superstar, West Side Story, and Les Misérables. If your "reality" show doesn't exist in a heightened reality on par with the hallucinatory excess of a Broadway musical, then I may as well be watching the news.

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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

eclairwolf
@eclairwolf

feel like people making these kind of reality shows lately are missing the most important part of what made Iron Chef a good show: you get to watch the host take a big chomp out of a bell pepper like it's an apple and then look directly at the camera

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in reply to @irisjaycomics's post:

gaw
@gaw

Taskmaster gets this. Greg is a petty, nigh-impotent noble and Alex is his terrible ferret of an assistant/sub/life-partner. They sit in thrones (Greg's is bigger) and assign their contestants ridiculous and cruel tasks delivered in fancy wax-sealed form. It's basically a more fraught Iron Chef if instead of making food with weird ingredients you have to get a potato into a bucket (and sometimes also make food with weird ingredients).

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fingerless
@fingerless

I want one of the competitions to have a roman gladiatorial Colosseum theme, even if it's for a hobby like crocheting.

"Gladys, both consuls have given the thumbs down to your porcelain pony. You will be fed to a lion, and you will not be advancing to the next round."

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liquid
@liquid

I think another thing that made it incredibly special that modern competition reality shows just can't live up to is that nobody in its run time ever broke kayfabe. No one ever acknowledged that the fancy Prince was just an actor, or that the "magnificent stadium" that he built was just stay sound stage, every contestant played along with the elaborate reasoning behind why they should have a grudge match against a particular iron chef, even though it had all been scheduled weeks ahead. It was a lot like tokosatu shows and that it didn't try and be cool, or treat its own silliness as something to be embarrassed about, it was just openly and unabashedly itself, fully silly and fully enthusiastic

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