It's A New Find!

That title just above being a reference to the song by the excellently kitsch, provocative, alluringly gorgeous and downright odd Japanese pop-punk band Shonen Knife. And speaking of kitsch, provocative, and lovely yet askew things hailing from the East Asian geographical region, we've just discovered the incomprehensible majesty of CrunchyRoll.

Think the BBC's streaming iPlayer is the best thing since BitTorrent? Well, imagine a (probably not quite legal) equivalent for Chinese television, featuring all kinds of weird and wonderful programming. Essentially, YouTube, but with fewer concerns over copyright infringement. It's a potential goldmine. In fact, we're almost tempted to jump around the room clicking our heels in mid-air like a nineteenth century American prospector. We're not going to, though.

One such gem is a healthy collection of a demented variety show called The Super Trio Continues. Going by our comprehensive research (ahem), the show sees "Each episode feature several popular Hong Kong celebrities as guest stars. Sometimes Miss Hong Kong pageants and other international pageants are invited. They participate in different party games devised by the producers, usually all of these are ridiculous or sexually provocative. At the end of each round, attractive (or sometimes bizarre) prizes would be awarded to the winners."

Games include:
* Eating huge amounts of wasabi
* Licking contest
* Mini question & answer game shows
* Bad singing recognition contests
* Burping contest
* Piggy back riding
* Seaweed kissing contest
* Charades

Better yet, individual seasons had titles which were translated as things like "The Universally Invincible Prize Master" and "The Continually Invincible Prize Master".

Why couldn't Noel's House Party be like that, eh? Anyway, here's the link to just one of the episodes, and to whet your collective appetite, a few sample screengrabs of just what goes on. This really could replace Tudo é Possível as our favourite sprawling yet incomprehensible foreign language game show.

"Attract sequence" seemingly taken from a Neo-Geo game? Oh yes.


Trio (natch) of presenters who wear differing (but matching) garb for each episode? Yup.


Demented games like this one? Where the contestants have to run barefoot over an assault course of what seems to be Lego (but which surely isn't, as that would hurt, probably)...


...then neck a bottle of soft drink in one go, and burp into a sound measuring device...


...and whoever belches the loudest is the winner? Of course!


Hug racing?


Some sort of weird game where a man seems to breathe on a prone woman until someone off-screen whaps them on the back of the head?


Surely not what you're thinking, here.