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Iron Chef
1993 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Fuji Creative Corporation, Keiichi Tanaka
Iron Chef is a Japanese television cooking show produced by Fuji Television. The series, which premiered on October 10, 1993, is a stylized cook-off featuring guest chefs challenging one of the show's resident "Iron Chefs" in a timed cooking battle built around a specific theme ingredient. The series ended on September 24, 1999, although occasional specials were produced until 2002. The series aired 309 episodes. Repeats are regularly aired on the Cooking Channel in the United States and on Special Broadcasting Service in Australia. Fuji TV will air a new version of the show, titled Iron Chef, beginning in October 26, 2012.
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10 comments on Hacker News
Nothing. No computer, No TV (I don't do TV)
Crumbs get into keyboards.
But before your generation, seriously, Dad would watch news during dinner, and it was coverage of the Vietnam war. Not to be a smartass, but I found the imagery and emotionally charged opinions expressed (half of them, anyway) to be completely unsuited to dinner.
So, I play music. Not just at dinnertime but anytime, classical music is good for the soul. If you have a nearby classical radio station, they will likely play lots of music that doesn't demand attention. But most stations stream and you can go from light to heavy music that demands and rewards close attention.
The big benefit of audio, any old time, is that you are free to roam around and actually get those irreducible chores (or work) done without lock-in.
If you abstain from TV for a while, encountering it is rather shocking in the way it pulls your brain into the screen and takes it over.
FWIW, I used to watch old movies and shows when I was married and we had cable. Dinner can be quite the experience when watching the old Japanese "Iron Chef" episodes, since food is the focus. For nostalgia buffs, the original series used great music by Hans Zimmer, from the movie "Backdraft" which added to the camp feeling.
Lots of people will have a show on or something while they're cooking or cleaning or doing other things. Is it worse for it to be interesting technical content with fun other stuff thrown in than if was an episode of Friends or Fraiser or Iron Chef or 9-1-1: Lone Star or The Price is Right?
I guess I'm only allowed to have The Masked Singer on while I make dinner.
Not the greatest, but interesting. "Backdraft" the movie has sound by Hans Zimmer, used extensively in the Japanese version of "Iron Chef." which was high camp fun.
The Full (Japanese) Iron Chef theme is here:
https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_30483
That's kind of like asking any variety of, "Can X videos make us better at X?"
Absolutely, but the more relevant question is if a particular cooking video or series, out of the vast set of "cooking videos" will make a particular viewer a better cook.
Probably not. I'd suggest a few questions to determine if that's true.
What is the specificity of the video? Some "cooking" videos only pretend to be about teaching cooking but they're actually about something entirely different. I love watching old episodes of Iron Chef but I don't expect to learn anything practical. Some cooking shows are about a particular aspect of cooking; a video on cooking with Spam won't make me a better cook because I don't cook with Spam. A video on how to make cakes look attractive with fondant won't make me a better cook because I like food made of food ingredients rather than construction materials.
Does the author know their subject matter? Many videos tell you stuff that's just plain wrong, or even dangerous (don't make popcorn on a soda-can stove with methanol or it could blow up in your face).
Are they level-appropriate? When I left for college, my mom gave me a copy of "How to boil an egg". I got a lot of benefit out of that book but something similar would be useless today. By the same token, years later, we got a lot of great information of of Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible", but it wouldn't have helped me at all as a freshman with a communal kitchen and minimal cooking ability.
There's also the question of what the viewer is going to do with it. You can watch videos all day long without getting any better at cooking. If you want to get better at cooking you primarily need to cook. Some videos may aid that effort but even the best ones will only help to the extent that you're willing to implement what they teach and practice it.
You should watch a couple of Iron Chef episodes if you want to feel extra slow :D
Lots of US TV gets adapted for other markets. Check out how many US-original game shows have Chinese versions, for instance. Lots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_game_shows
Sitcoms also get adapted pretty often. Talk and panel shows, sometimes.
We do the same thing in the US, just a bit less because we've got a really, really big domestic entertainment industry, so something's got to seem just right (in terms of "will this make money?") to get picked up, shouldering its way past all the US-original shows trying to get made, but it does happen. The Office, Power Rangers (half import, half adaptation), Iron Chef, Ninja Warrior (also has a German version!) and a bunch of others.
Heh. Go watch the Japanese Iron Chef episode with the guy from SF.
Japanese gourmets definitely do the "ridiculously expensive, questionable choice" thing too. The beef episode made me want to cry.
Is the English-dubbed version of the original Japanese Iron Chef show on here? Would love to see some full episodes. That one has been hard to find.
So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology conflict” but if I were writing it, I would call it “people versus tools” to clarify that usually fighting off a robot counts as one of the other conflicts. Like if you have to land a plane, that is PvTool conflict.
In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict.
Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ...
A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started.
One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.
Iron Chef does a decent job of this. I wish they offered different "cuts" of episodes - I don't care about anything the judges have to say until they're chewing.