Has The Recent Batsu Games Become Redundant?

I’ve enjoyed so many earlier Batsu games my favorites include both Hot Springs challenges, but I just spent a full 3 hours plus watching the 2010 - No-Laughing Spy Batsu epic only to find it rather dull and not too much creative inspiration happening this time around. I laugh a few times with Matsumoto twisting the Hamada action figure around but perhaps there are too many in-jokes dealing with Japanese TV stars I’m not familiar with or have the shows writers and team finally been rained out for this cherished event? :worried:

[img:2uelx480]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RdJntyu5LI0/TO7kmRpfYRI/AAAAAAAAAg4/8dye9r8WlVs/s1600/No+Laughing+Spy.jpg[/img:2uelx480]

How does the 2011 Airport Batsu rate?

I have to be honest, 2010’s Spy Batsu seemed a little stale to me, as well. Generally speaking, the more batsu that you watch, the more boring it becomes.
That said, I think there are some interesting twists in the 2011 batsu game. They may only be small twists conceptually, but I think it’s worth three or four hours of your time. If only because it was filmed (partly?) in Ibaraki prefecture.

They started heading downhill with Hotel(although the weather hurt things) and Spy is easily my most disliked but I absolutely love Airport, I think it was amazing and had me laughing as hard as I was with Newspaper.

This topic’s come up in previous Batsu Game threads I believe, looking in there may give you more food for thought.

I haven’t watched the Spy batsu or Airport batsu yet but a few quick ideas:

  • That personal opinion thing. It’s a pain. XD
  • It seems the No-Laughing producers’ strategy is to go with routines and traps that ‘work’ than risk a segment that falls flat, leading to a lot of the same routines appearing in the recent no-laughing specials. (That’s a good question though; who’s setting up these specials? Suga and co.?)
  • Japanese audiences would by default find the celebrity appearances hilarious because they recognise them, know their history etc., whereas even non-Japanese who know the language enough to not need subtitles are unlikely to know enough about them to quite get the joke.
  • Most people would only watch these once a year so maybe if you watch them very close to each other (likely if someone downloads all the translations in one go) the novelty may wear off a little? This is by no means judging you as a person! :P But it is an observation I’ve made about myself, and this is the reason I haven’t watched Spy or Airport yet; I’m trying to space them out a little.
    I’m also saying this because my friend happened to watch Spy Batsu first on his own accord, and he said he hasn’t laughed like that in months. If he saw the other batsus first, would his reaction be different? I’m not sure.

I was expecting to be a little disappointed by Hotel Man but while I still like the older ones better (Hospital and Hot Springs 2 are my favourites, I think) it made me fall off my chair laughing, even the parts I expected not to like at all. For instance, the gossip segment in Newspaper Agency left me cold, but in Hotel Man? BRILLIANT, both the content and the timing (following up the bombshells dropped about Hamada and Endo with that ‘rumour’ about Tanaka… oh man.)

I’d still enjoy a new No-Laughing game but if they decided to do something else (even if only to give the poor guys a break, since they seem to be recovering from a new operation every time they film these) I wouldn’t mind.

Maybe one or both of Downtown could go back to being ‘masterminds’ and their places could be filled with other comedians. Hell, let all five of them be masterminds, and do what Matsumoto once suggested–make Arashi play instead. I’d watch that. XD

I still like them, but what really keep me interested is the unskitted stuff the cast do, or what isn’t in the script to happen… like for example:

  • Reporter: Matsumoto got Hamada with the picture of that 22 year old guy twice, one on Hamada’s chair, the other under the cushion.
  • Hotelman: Matsumoto’s heavy laughter to the "Sweet Potato Chips"
  • Hotelman: The tagger backswinging and hitting the coffee cup out of Matsumoto’s hand.
  • Reporter: (I think), When Hamada tickled the hell out of Matsumoto and made him fall.
  • Spy: Matsumoto doing the backflips with the Hamada doll.

While the skitted stuff seems to be the same alot, it’s the cast themselves that keep them entertaining to me. These 5 in a room with eachother, God knows what the hell will happen, lol.

Thanks all for some mighty big food for thought! Yes perhaps I have been glutinous with watching so many in a short amount of time but the appetite for laughter just got the best of me! I just finished the Spy Batsu and must say for me The "Elite Spies" training segment was well worth the wait such originality those men deserved their own weekly series ;)

Perhaps your onto something Paichu, some new fresh acts should take on a challenge set by the original cast to give their butts and talents a rest :lol:

I’ll be taking a little time off now to watch Hotel Man and Airport and report back later :)

I think that Spy is probably the worst, not too much happened in that one.
I actually liked Hotel and I haven’t finished Airport but its been really good so far.
Hotel fav bit has got to be when Shin oni was doing impressions and when they all had to improvise a scene (lol)

My favourite Batsu though is High school, then Yugawara, then 24 hour tag. Those 3 will always be special to me :)

I myself thought that they were maybe starting to get redundant on spy but airport is so good that I’ve changed my mind again. lol.

But even though I say redundant any Gaki (and most Japanese) TV is funnier and better than anything else around so I let it slide. :)

Yes that is correct in saying that these are better than anything on American television since it seemed to have gotten so full of self deprecating and boring reality shows :puke:

The hotel batsu seems to be my next adventure :)

So far, the only thing since Hotel that makes me laugh is when the 5 are together and unexpectedly trigger others to laugh. Other than that, I don’t feel it’s funny. Actually for the Airport, I laughed alot when then girl with a dog enters the bus. That part is amazing.

Well, I saw all of the batsu games, and some of them aren’t that funny. newspaper have some funny scenes but in general isn’t so good like the others >_> but I belive you have to think about how many effort they do to make this show. All of us know it is not something easy… Sometimes it isn’t what you are expecting but you will never say ‘oh, I wasted my time watching this one’

I think the biggest pitfall of this series is that it is obviously no longer a punishment game. The gang are expected to laugh at all skits and the slaps (apart from Thai kick) are no deterrent to laughing.
Having removed the punishment aspect of the game it just becomes a string of skits that are hit or miss. I would say a certain amount of comedic value has been lost due to that.

Hospital and Reporter were my great ones. Hospital started alot. It was fresh. Between the pits, the guy counting to 40, the pregnancy event, the introduction to the buttons, the rap, and the scares at the end, as well as more, it was too awesome. Reporter got me with the limping guy, the guy in the dufflebag, the part Matsumoto got Hamada twice trapping him with the picture, the false hope of Yamasaki avoiding Chono, as well as others as well.

what [b:1oaree8q]karn1911[/b:1oaree8q] said

I do not think so, that it is obviously no longer a punishment game. :clap:

If you want my opinion, I think the whole of it became redundant. I don’t find the same fun I used to find in GnT any more.
What they used to do for fun became more like a business they HAVE to maintain, no matter what. What I miss the most are punishment games like Hot Spring Inn 1 & 2 (probably the best games they’ve made). Starting from Hotelman, it got dull.

But of course I still love their manzai, those never changed :inlove:

And also don’t forget that we’re missing most of the fun because of our cultural background (different from theirs). We don’t understand the jokes they make about dialects etc and all other Japanese "inside jokes" ;)

I love the Hot Spring (1 and 2) batsu, the haunted hotel and the haunted recital, and of course 24 hour tag. There’s a simple reason for that: It was about cast. The focus was squarely on the casts ability to withstand the situation they were put in. Now, for the new batsu style games, it’s about the acts. It’s about the comedy and the antics around them rather than the cast themselves. Everything has to be setup or pushed for the jokes. I think that’s the discrepancy from the older ones to the new ones.

On those days where I’m down and I need some humor, I watch old 80’s/90’s cartoons and shows, or I watch GnT/Gottsu ee Kanji. Both have the same affect and I do notice that if I don’t constantly watch every show, I do find the new batsu games extremely funny. I watched the Spy batsu game maybe 3 or 4 times in a couple of weeks after the full sub was released. I wanted to see all the humor and laughs. But it wasn’t that funny as the old ones. I just stopped watching batsu games all together. That was almost a year ago. The last couple of months I watched one or two of the new ones (Spy, Police, Hospital) and I found them all equally funny and had a really good time watching it. The old adage holds true for GnT: Everything in moderation.

extra thought -
If there had to be a new twist for batsu games. I would make it a VS game. I would love to see smaller batsu games that would last a couple of hours but each batsu would have it’s own mastermind. Yamazaki vs everyone, Downtown vs everyone, Boke vs Tsukkomi (matsumoto and tanaka vs hamada and endo). That would really give a chance for the comedians’ talents and humor to really shine.

I love Spy batsu, as well as hotel. They are all very good. I have watched most of the batsu games.

redundant, yes, batsu games goes in the same pattern yearly. 24-hour tag up to hospital batsu are the greatest, as for the rest that follows, the laughable quality(*what @_@) become less especially the spy batsu, i dont laugh as much as i do in hotel.

What they need to do for starters is pull someone out. They had the passed… that… (Airport, spy, hotelman, reporter, hospital)… 5 years of all of them taking part?.. Having one or two sitting out to instigate the laughs is just as good. Hell, as much as I love Yamasaki, I say, let him sit out one. He has been in all the major Batsu games so far. Let him instigate some pain. :D

Also, the whole "job" thing is also getting old. They did have the tag idea before, then the vacation hotspring thing, and going to school. Surely, there are other things one can do in Japan that isn’t job related. If they can stretch a school day to 24 hours, what is stopping them from stretching… I dunno, No Laughing Baseball, or No Laughing Festival, or something else out there?

There you go. Grab the four, let Yamasaki instigate, and force them all into Baseball Camp or something. I would love to see Tanaka throw a fastball.

Yeah spy sucked i found, after about the 2hour part it just went down hill, jimmy san wasnt to funny either compared to his previous skits like in the school one haha, although that impersonator guy was good, im yet to watch airport. Yeah they need to freshen it up a bit, the job ones arent to bad as long as the skits are funny, the hot spring dart one was pretty good, maybe they need to try and reformat it a bit try a different sort of hmm idk but the same thing over and over with the desks is getting sort of old, maybe they need to do a whole group haunted house like they did to matsumoto, although tanaka would need to be wrapped in bubble-wrap otherwise he’d be bruised to all hell hahaha