TUF Shit, series 7 episode 8.19b banana

TUF productions are pulling out all the stops with this season and have completely revamped the intro again.

Fade up from black to pink as a guitar wails hard. Some tinkly piano music can be heard as well as the sound of a tin of beans being slopped on an old bed. Suddenly “Livin’ on a Prayer” starts chunking out of your speakers HARD and there is a closeup of a foot with a cowboy boot tapping to the rythm. Zoom out to reveal Dana White in a cowboy outfit and a stars and stripes ten gallon hat. He has a large red white and blue saxaphone in his arms. Cut to a close up of his face. He winks twice then begins rocking out HARD on the sax. Suddenly the screen explodes and you see Rampage Jackson driving a hummer over the ocean. Water sprays up behind him. Zoom in on his face and he smiles and you see his teeth are gold. The words “Coach Quinton Rampage Jackson” slam and fizzle onto the screen in big purple letters.

Wipe to Forrest Griffin swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan. He is wearing a bear skin. Zoom in on his face and he smiles and you can see his teeth are just made from normal teeth. “Coach Forrest Griffin” dribbles onto  the screen with a fizzling noise. Bon Jovi appears on the screen and high-fives Griffin.

Random montage of whales splashing through the ocean, submarines crashing into each other and exploding, a monkey stuffing onions in a blender, a tank rolling over a supermarket, two helicopters firing missiles at a donkey which explodes, and a man in suspenders eating a cigar.

THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER writes itself onto the screen as if being sprayed on with aerosol. Fade down to black.

A recap of last week’s fights are shown. Cale Yarborough defeated Patrick Schultz by snapping off the Bostonians frosted hair and stabbing him in the eyes with it. Referee Steve Mazaggatti’s moustache had become aroused during the bout and swelled to five times its normal size, obscuring the pint-sized official’s vision, thus allowing the young fighter to get away with the flagrant bending of the rules.

Griffin and Rampage, no doubt spurred on by panicking producers, get really pumped and start yelling and breaking stuff. Like a bunch of college students whose drinks have been spiked with Viagra, everybody walks around being really pumped and not really knowing why or who to punch. The coaches decide to settle their differences with a game of hide and seek but unfortunately Rampage has to pull out halfway through when he steps on a banana skin, slips up, somersaults in the air and lands on a home barbecue set covered in delicious marinade.

Back at the house, a sunglass wearing competition is in full effect. The game remains tied for a few hours with participants frantically wearing the sunglasses as hard as they can. Eventually the game is abandoned as no winner can be decided but everyone agrees Jesse is the loser because he dipped his glasses in ketchup and ate them with a confused look on his face.

Dana White arrives in a private jet which lands on the roof of the TUF house, crushing the east wing and slaughtering a cast member known only as Bill, but he was quiet and had not received any air time yet so it’s all cool. Dana White backflips from the cockpit and fires a machine gun into the air. He produces a megaphone and simply yells “Fuck” really loud a few times. In the ensuing silence, somebody from the cast yells “WARRIOR” and everybody cheers.

A helicopter appears out of nowhere. David Letterman wearing nothing but a tattered pair of overalls and a baseball hat abseils down and grabs Dana White around the waist then the two of them fly off into the sunset.

Fade to sparkling green as “Take my Breath Away” begins playing.

The Ultimate Fighter Intro: Redux

With an unexpected afternoon off work and a new musical discovery (Dead Can Dance), I boshed together my own take on the TUF intro.

It is nothing special, I did no fancy editing, I just wanted to give it a different flavour. I tried to do it “Pride style” if you will, with the “epic, earth-shattering consequences” feeling that Sato Daisuke somehow managed to capture in all his videos.

Enjoy!

Tell me what you think. Would you like a TUF that was presented in a more dramatic way, or does it not fit? Do you prefer the nu-metal soundtrack, the locker-room samurai feel?

TUF Shit Episode 6

The episode opens with a cat being flayed alive and nailed to a wall. No, wait, sorry. That didn’t happen.

The guys in the car on the way back from the fight pick make some actually rather amusing gags about Matt Brown.

Then the show is in danger of showing too much normal activity and interesting dialogue from the fighters so that scene quickly switches to muscled, tattooed guys with their caps on backwards knocking back shots of liquor. Phew!

After every shot the boys say “woo” and look around at each other, pleased as little kids who have just laid a turd on the kitchen floor and are waiting for their mums to come home and see it. Tim Credeur breaks the unwritten rule by talking to the camera man. They let it slip this time because he is badmouthing some idiot but I know that Dana White later inserted a screwdriver into Tim’s rectum while whispering “Will you ever speak to the cameraman again big man?” in his ear.

Jeremy May makes out that he was only pretending to be doing shots and was really doing water, but I don’t believe him because his face is so disgusting greasy and his eyelids so puffy that he has to be hungover.

Jeremy May says that “in a good Christian way, he is going to beat his (Matt Brown’s) face in.” If there’s anything I like more than an annoying twat, it’s an annoying religious twat. He claims to be training Jeremy Jitsu. I can’t even begin to describe how lame this is.

Lots of shots of Matt Brown looking moody and be-goateed. He says some things about prison and drugs and alcohol. He doesn’t say “warrior” which is strange, but I commend him for resisting the urge.

The Excite-O-Pumpometer vagely flickers between “Huh? What?” and “Ooh I found a toenail” as Matt Brown and Jeremy May do the weird posing-for-non-existant-photographs thing.

Jeremy May says that he has been faking a knee injury because he has to do “what works for him.” So what works for him is not training hard for a fight? This Jeremy Jitsu is sounding shittier by the second.

The fight starts and Jeremy May throws punches so wide that I think he brushed the gums of the audience with them. I’m waiting for Brown to unleash the kind of attack that will have May’s grandchildren pre-emptively retroactively crapping in their pants in the future. It doesn’t come.

I feel Forrest’s frustration as he yells “RELEASE THE ANIMAL ALREADY BROWN!” again and again, so loud that he loses his voice. I mean, Brown was made out to be some kind of dangerous killing machine that could flip out at any moment and start tearing people’s ears off at the breakfast table, but in the fight he looks about as aggressive as a neutered koala. Who is asleep.

Jeremy May shows the most advanced technique of Jeremy Jitsu, called “gasping for air and flailing around”, but luckily Brown is able to capitalise on it and counter by kicking him in the face.

There is another fight between two people that I didn’t even realise were on the show until now. Way to go, idiot editors.

They have a pretty good fight and exchange a whole bunch of headbutts. The handsome guy wins one for team Rampage, which has Rampage happier than a pig in shit.

Fade to black with the SAME FUCKING MUSIC AGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN.

PS Here is last week’s wrapup. Show me some comment love assfaces!

TUF Shit – Episode 5

Sigh.

I’m finding it pretty difficult to maintain interest in this series, I don’t know why. It’s very much a paint-by-numbers kind of show. All you need to do is change the names and you pretty much have every single show.

Fighter A defeats Fighter B. Fighter A calls fighter B a warrior and Fighter B admires Fighter A’s warrior spirit. Other team members congratulate their fighter on being a warrior. Dana White says that they went out there and were warriors and that they have a future in the UFC. Coach A is pissed off and walks around growling. Coach B is happy and high fives his warriors repeatedly.

Back at the house, Fighter D has pissed/spat/poured something in Fighter H’s protein/chewing tobacco/marmalade/mouth. Fighter H is mad as hell and says that warriors should never mess with another warrior’s stuff, for fear of making that warrior mad, and having him get all warrior up in yo ass.

Fighter D challenges Fighter H to pick him and then they can settle their differences in the octagon, like warriors. Fighter D agrees.

Dana White / Coach A / Coach B randomly turns up at the house. All fighters laugh/giggle/talk nervously. There is much high-fiving. Then he leaves.

POSSIBLE ALTERNATE STORYLINE! Fighter P gets a message from home. We the viewers are privy to the truth: His dog has hurt its paw/his wife missed a period/his friend got drunk and accidentally took a dump on his own head/his pet turtle got sat on by a horse but is OK now/his girlfriend spontaneously combusted. Other fighters grill Fighter P on what happened. Fighter P loves the attention and holds back for a long time on the news. Other fighters assume Fighter P’s parents have killed themselves and each other in a double murder suicide, or that a plane has just crashed on a nuclear plant in their hometown completely decimating everything they’ve ever known. Fighter P eventually reveals the truth and is silently stripped of his warrior status and loses all his friends.

The pick for the next fight is decided. Fighter M and Fighter Z step up to each other and attempt to intimidate each other with growls/grunts/lack of high-fives/warrior-type motions. Other fighters whoop and high five each other hard.

A preview for the next fight is shown. Fighter M punches/kicks/knees Fighter Z in the head/body/leg/pancreas. Repeat as nu-metal fades in and the sounds of warriors can be heard.

END!

Actually I am looking forward to Matt Brown against that May guy, who is one of the biggest idiots I have ever seen in my life.

Brown: Are we that tight that we can play around like that?

May (sheepishly, a large brown stain slowly spreading in his underpants): I… well… I mean… I thought we could be…

AWESOME! Warrior.

Oh, I forgot to add… Tim Credeur, still pumped from his previous outing as a warrior, and obviously has been reading the Hagakure on the toilet again, steps up to the two fighters after the fight and says “Way to be warriors, guys. Way to be warriors.”

Way to be warriors, indeed.

TUF Shit – An Ultimate Fighter Blog

Episode 3!

The guys get to go in the house, which much to everyone’s relief looks basically identical to the last house. Heaven forbid any innovation or originality.

The teams are picked and some guy gets picked last. Personally I would have been all “Well, Luke Cummo got picked last and look at him now!” but the guy just sulkily high-fives with everyone.

One guy gets sent home for having a fungus growing on his neck. That must pretty much be the worst feeling in the world, second only to thinking you’ve won the lottery then losing the winning ticket or getting to the finish line of a marathon in first place and then sponteneously combusting.

The one thing that never ceases to amaze me about the people on this show, and thus I must extrapolate all young American males, is that they covet shit-talking as some kind of essential skill that all fighters must have. To be fair, the producers probably egg them on to say all this dumb crap, but I am always flabbergasted at the sheer amount of ridiculously bombastic crud that they spray out of their mouths:

“Well we are two warriors and we’re gonna go to war in the cage and leave our blood and guts on the cage floor in our war battle.”

“I’m here to bring the pain and I have a job to do and I’m going to do it and if he is in my way then God help him and his family because I am a warrior and warriors do battles in the cage of destiny and I’m here to get in, do my job, get out, and warrior.”

“My god have mercy on his warrior soul because we are two warriors here to do battle and war. Our blood and warrior souls will battle against each other in the cage and I’ve got a warrior’s job to do and my spirit will battle against his soul in the battle-cage when we go to war I’m going to try to knock his head off. I like to hurt people, it’s fun. I’ve got a job to do and I’m just going to do it and if he tries to take the warrior-bread from my warrior family’s table then I’m going to have the warrior his face off HARD. Warrior.”

I mean, fuck, can they be any more pretentious?

TUF participants checklist:

TATTOOS OF DRAGONS OR CELTIC DESIGNS: Check.
INTIMIDATING SOUNDING NICKNAME: Check.
CRAP TEENAGE SHIT TALKING SKILLZ: Check.
ACTUAL FIGHTING SKILLZ: TBC / will worry about that latr.

There is a fight and the guy who talked the most ridiculous shit got pulverised. Perhaps he should spend more time actually training rather than flexing in front of the mirror and practicing his pronounciation of the word “warrior”.

Rampage comes to hang out in the house and it goes down well. He declares himself the coolest person in the universe, which is OK by me. I think Forrest was on the show but I can’t remember.

Next week Forrest and Rampage shout at their teams a bit and someone called “Chad” or “Brody” or “Shayne” does something of interest in the house. Probably.

TUF Shit – An Ultimate Fighter Blog

The Ultimate Fighter Season 7 Blogathon!

Episode 2.

This episode was great. There was a bunch of really shit fights.

The last fight was pretty good. One guy had a beard.

Then Dana White sent half the people home to no jobs, no cars and probably no girlfriends!

The one-minute preview for the season actually looked pretty good. There seems to be a complete and utter lack of any form of innovation, but luckily lots of stupid shit being done by stupid idiots which is exactly why people watch reality TV, anyway.

Catch you next week, fuckers.