“Takeshi's Castle” and “MXC: The Extreme Elimination Challenge”
While living in Japan, I was introduced to a crazy series called Takeshianh's castle>. I liked it so much, I wrote a piece about it in the early days of this blog in late 2006. Fast forward to early August, Discotek Media announced that they had licensed an Americanized version of the series (MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge), I feel compelled to write some more with more information.
–> Buy MXC: The Most Extreme Elimination Challenge from Amazon.com!
What is Takeshi's Castle?
For those who don't know, Takeshi's castle is a funny, crazy game show in which contestants must participate in physical challenges. Indeed, it gave rise to a new genre of physical challenge programming for “normal” people to participate in. The premise of the show is that a large group of contestants (from what I understand, 142 people) form the “army” for the General. Tani. Their goal is to survive physical challenges. If not, they will be disqualified.
For example, one challenge that stood out for me was simple — cross a narrow, wobbly bridge over a body of water. Contestants must carry the ball across the bridge. However, cannons will shoot large rubber balls at contestants to knock them off the bridge. The results are often hilarious.
Finally, the survivors of the attack by General Tani's army attacked Takeshi's defensive castle. It was must-see TV when it aired, sadly it was almost over back then.
MXC: What was the toughest elimination challenge?
Takeshi's castle has been licensed and broadcast with major edits worldwide. (The British version uses Craig Charles's words Red Dwarf as narrator.) In the US, the re-edited and re-dubbed version aired on Spike TV as MXC: The most extreme elimination challenge. The dub of the series MXC has nothing to do with anything said in the original Japanese. Takeshi and other characters were renamed. The premise is changed so that the challenges are depicted as a team-versus-team event.
I have never watched it MXC on Spike TV. I watched clips on YouTube (from the old days of the site) and I was appalled by what I saw. Indeed, that is what inspired me to write my 2006 work. I don't want some Americanized trash. I think the only reason MXC became popular in the US because people were unaware of the superior source material.
Why not release Takeshi's Castle Unedited?
When Discotek Media announced that they would release MXCTwitter/User X Andrewhabara wrote about the work they did on the new release. I answered him: “Overcoming is difficult. Takeshi's castle was shown when I lived in Japan. This trope takes away from the original greatness of the original series. I just want to Takeshi's castle original.”
A few days ago, I understood why this could never happen from the JM Repository.
Impossible. Copyright issues make that impossible.
Audio from Takeshi's Castle is not clear in North America. The main element is music. But there are other things too. It was never actually broadcast in its original format anywhere else in the world (except Taiwan).
Ugh. It's not the first time music from Japan hasn't been licensed. And I'm not surprised that there are other rights issues. Heck, even Discotek has reported that to rescue the license MXCthey were unable to get all the episodes due to licensing reasons.
Regardless, I'm still hoping to get the unedited series. Even in Japan, the series is no longer physically released. Only 20 of the 133 episodes are available to stream.
Additionally, in 2023, Takeshi's castle has been brought back with a new season. Amazon has it for those with Prime. I'll have to give it a watch, but when I took a quick look, it seemed to be a pale imitation of what I remembered.
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