Reply #6: No....

[DoNotRefill]

the "painful eliminations" are the most spectacular screwups of the show. To give you an idea of the kind of stuff they do, in one contest they have "logs" on an axis spaced a with a few feet between them. The height of the logs is staggered. The logs start turning easily, and you have to jump or crawl from log to log to cross them all and reach safety. There's a big puddle of nasty water underneath to break the fall. One guy a few episodes ago did the "splits" on the log, and rolled over. There wasn't enough room for him to fit, so his head got twisted (he was OK).

Another thing they do is have the contestants run up a little allyway that goes uphill. Seems simple, right? Then they roll these big-assed paper-mache boulders down the hill at you, with almost no room between the walls and the fake rocks.

Another contest involves running at top speed across widely spaced concrete "rocks" just above water level. To make it interesting, some of the "rocks" you've got to use to cross the water are really styrofoam floats anchored in place with chains. If you hit the "fake rocks", you take a nasty spill. That doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that if you fall at high speed, you've got a decent chance of hitting one of the "real" rocks with your chest.

One of the sillier events involves swinging by a rope across a pool of water, towards a wall covered with velcro or something similar. The contestant has to stick to the wall, and not fall into the water. This means you've pretty much got to smack the wall, a la Wiley Coyote, with your whole body at once.

Another event involves holding onto a giant metal Shitake mushroom spun through the air by a crane, and then drop off onto a floating "lilly pad". The place you have to grab has only one handhold, and is too wide to encircle with arms or legs. This requires the contestant to deal with both gravity and centrifugal force, and to hit a pretty small target and not bounce off.

The show is the product of a sick and demented mind, and the commentary on the english-language version is outrageous. For instance, during the log-roll tonight, a guy got stuck with his hands on one log, and his feet on another, with the result that his butt was way up in the air. The commentators referred to this position as "The De-frocked Preacher", the "San Quentin", and other strange (but funny) terms.