I've been watching a Japanese kids' program, Tensai Terebikun Max. It's been on for years, sort of like an analog to Zoom, and gets weirder all the time.
Okay, so they divide the kids up into teams and they play different kinds of games, word games, logic games, etc. The teams always have names and one of the teams dresses in black. The last set of teams were The Underworld Family versus The Rainbow something-or-other. Right there, that gets me, that a team on a wholesome children's program gets to be evil. I think it's kind of neat, actually. The current set of teams, we have the Steam Knights, in red and sort of steampunk and knightly, versus the Jokey Mahones, in black and with a sort of early twentieth century gangster thing going on. Except it's not the Jokey Mahones, as I discovered today when I saw their name written in Roman letters for the first time.
They're the Jokey Mahorns.
This individual's theory (in Japanese, so if you can't read it, that's why) is that the "horn" part is a pun on horn like musical instrument and horn like a cow's horn. Now that I think of it, the Jokey Mahorns had horns on their helmets when they played paper airplane football. Okay. I'm glad that's resolved. (In Japanese, punning is the highest form of humor. I love it.)
The reason for my confusion is that Mahone and Mahorn are homophones when transliterated into Japanese.
But that's not the weirdest thing going on with this program. Right now, at least in TV Japan time which is on a bit of a delay, they're running a little serial drama called "My Tail" about a girl who wakes up one morning with a tail. Only it's not a tail, it's a space alien shaped like a tail, whose head is a green pompom with a little pink pompom antenna on top. And it talks to her. It gives her superpowers sort of: she can run really fast and do much better in gym. The downside? It occasionally knocks her out so it can converse privately with its buddies out in space who are planning to take over Planet Earth.
You can't make this shit up, people.
Oh, wait—
382 words | October 27, 2005 10:01 PM | Lost in translation