Why I Must Get Japanese TV

If you have read my blog at all, you know that I typically take shots at how bad American TV has become. So you can imagine how excited I became when I saw this. As near as I can tell, it's called "Smile Big Smack Hamster."

SBSH opens with an animated theme song, then zooms in on a sign that reads "HAMU," a common Japanese abbreviation for hamsters (from "hamuemon"). "Hamu" also means "ham" in Japanese ("awwww, look at the little hamu ..."). The camera zooms out to show the elaborate cartoony house-like set, featuring one woman (who is the MC), four men and a guest (all dressed as hamsters). The contestants sit in large holes; the costumes have little mouse hands and arms that are controlled by sticks, like a puppet. The costumes only go down to the waist, the rest is covered by a black bodysuit.

After the MC greets the players, a guest hamster comes through some doors and sits down. The MC then runs through the rules (pre-taped), and the game gets underway.

The game progresses via a click track, with a recorded voice calling out groups of three colors to the beat, and each of the six contestants takes a turn to name three objects with those colors in time to the clicks. Usually, the first two colors are the same ("White! White! Blue!"). Occasionally all three of the colors will be the same, in which case the contestant must name three different objects of that color. If someone screws up (wrong color, not fast enough, off the beat), they get buzzed. Occasionally when someone flubs a color they'll jump out of the hole, shouting and stomping around the set.

V/O: "Yellow! Yellow! White!"
Hamster #1: "Lemon! Lemon! Mochi!"
V/O: "Red! Red! Yellow!"
Hamster #2: "Tomato! Tomato! Mustard!"
V/O: "White! White! Beige!"
Hamster #3: "Cloud! Cloud! BEIGE??? AWAHH!!! AWAHH!"
[buzzer sounds]

If someone screws up three times, they're loaded into a chair sled and shot through a giant cat's mouth. The loser's face/upper body is slammed into the "tongue" of the cat, in actuality a large piece of cloth slathered with an irritant (hot mustard, pepper, etc). That would be the "big smack," I suppose.
These segments are obviously pre-scripted/rehearsed. The chances of Hamuzo/Hamudon/the guest nearly always getting the difficult colors, and Niihamu/Hamuemon always getting meatballs, for example, seems remote.

Since they do kanji/kana subtitling in the relevant color, it's like a little Japanese language lesson. This also makes it easy to follow - you might not understand the between-play banter for the most part, but it's precisely obvious what's happening during play, unlike most foreign-language game shows. After awhile, you pick up some of the object names, like "posuto" (you'll hear it pronounced "posto") is a red post-office box, "ringo" is apple (Ringo Starr has done at least one applesauce commercial over there), "karashi" is mustard, etc.

As much as I want this to come to American TV, I am terrified that it will be "Americanized" and feature the cast of That 70's show or Yes Dear!