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Iron Suck

Jul 20, 2008
By .
Food, Television

I was most pleased to learn that the original Iron Chef, the Japanese version which is only improved by the dubbing, is running on a spin-off of the Food Network, known as the Fine Living Channel. I can't stand the American version of the show, because it lacks that je ne sais quois. BUT…

I can barely stand this version either. It has everything it needs, with one exception. It has undubbed Takeshi Kaga. It has Dr. Yukio Hattori. It has Ota continually bursting in with "Fukui San!" It has live animals being slaughtered on television. It has "Allez Cuisine!" It has the strange judges like Korn, the actresses, or from unusual professions like fortune teller or "Rosanjin Scholar" (As an aside, if I were still musically inclined, I'd start a band called "Rosanjin Scholar.") Most importantly, it has Chen Kenichi, Hiroyuki Sakai, Rokusaburo Michiba / Masaharu Morimoto, and Masahiko Kobe.

BUT… Copyright control caught up. It doesn't have the soundtrack to the mediocre film "Backdraft" anymore. A most wonderful soundtrack, for this show, bombastic, melodramatic, overblown, everything that the soundtrack to a show about men in outlandish costumes cooking for a panel of Liberace-lookalikes and Japanese lower house members should be. Instead, it has a soundtrack that sounds as though it came from a bad videogame made in 1995, programmed by a tone-deaf teenager on a Mac. As great as the original is, the unwelcome substitution of scores makes the show near unwatchable.

A pity. Here's Iron Chef, as Chairman Kaga meant it to be heard:

Last 5 posts by Patrick

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4 Comments

  1. Keith  •  Jul 21, 2008 @12:10 am

    Forget trying to watch the Fine Living version of the show. The Iron Chef Collection currently has over 140 Iron Chef episodes from the Food Network broadcasts and will eventually have every single Food Network episode. We also will have over 30 Japanese language episodes that never aired on Food Network, including the Japan Cup 2002 and Millennium Cup specials.

    http://www.ironcheffans.info

  2. Bruce  •  Jul 21, 2008 @4:58 am

    I love Iron Chef too and hope we can avoid the pomp-less version down here.

    The only time it tests my inner palette is when they have a very Japanese battle like the River Fish battle. When our voice-over guy's "memory serves" that we should "consider the innards" of the fish to get the best out of it – I'm not down for that.

    Has anyone ever seen Kobe called out?

  3. Derrick  •  Jul 21, 2008 @5:28 am

    I've seen him called out before. By an italian chef. It was not pretty, he got crushed.

    He also got called out by a dessert chef, and the secret ingredient was banana. He got crushed there too.

  4. Patrick  •  Jul 21, 2008 @1:45 pm

    Kobe participated in around 20 battles. To be fair, he started out very young (I don't think he even had his own restaurant at the beginning), and grew over time in a way that Michiba and Chen couldn't, since they were A-list chefs at the beginning.

    The episode that prompted this post was one of the last Kobe episodes, the second tomato battle, in which Kobe was pitted against a very experienced Roman chef who made wonderful dishes. Kobe beat him nonetheless, producing even better dishes including a basil tomato ravioli that I want to make sometime.