Stay with me on this one.
We got sucked in to "Unbeatable Banzuke" this weekend.
It's mind-blowingly difficult Japanese game show in which athletes take part in obstacle courses. Really, really hard obstacle courses.
For one, you have to walk through an obstacle course while balancing a huge metal pole on you palm. If your pole wavers off of vertical, it hits metal pieces that have electric current running through them. Or you can take part in the obstacle course that puts you on stilts on a conveyor belt that has trip lines on it.
You can see why we can't tear ourselves away.
How does that tie in to environmentalism? The show is the original Japanese footage with English voice overs. Nine times out of 10, when a show is a success in another country, they rush to produce it over here. See "Big Brother," "American Idol," "Coupling," "The Office," etc., etc., etc. Ditto for movies
But why? Why pay for more sets, more costumes, more lights, more interviews, more scripts, more electricity for filming and everything else when you have a finished version available?
Somewhere, I read that the greenest house is a house that's already built. You're not consuming new resources to make it. Maybe the greenest show is a show that's already been filmed.
"Unbeatable Banzuke," now showing on G4 network, was filmed in the 1990s. They probably used a lot of resources, emitted a lot of carbon. But now, that environmental impact is being reduced by having it, the finished product, take the place of a possible newly filmed show that would generate carbon and waste.
It's like giving clothes to charity, only Japan is giving game shows to the U.S.
Everyone wins. The shows the we get here from other places are great. New Zealand's "Wa$ted!" is every bit as good as the U.S. version it inspired. Britain's "Coupling" beats the pants off the lousy version the U.S. tried a few years back.
And "Unbeatable Banzuke" .... well, where in America would we find enough skilled unicyclists for the unicycle course? It just has to be the greener-cuz-it's-already-made Japanese version.