Sunday, December 30, 2007

The First SASUKE? Plus, Kane Kosugi at the Shaolin Temple: Kinniku Banzuke!

Well, it looks like G4 is going to re-air the Kinniku Banzuke (Muscle Ranking) series as a show called Unbeatable Banzuke. For those who don't know, Kinniku Banzuke is the TV series that spawned SASUKE, KUNOICHI, Sportsman No. 1 and the Muscle Musical. It aired from 1995 to 2002 and was then replaced by two other shows that didn't do as well and eventually got canceled. You can read all about it here.
Kane Kosugi was a big part of Kinniku Banzuke as a competitor in SASUKE and the Sportsman No. 1 shows (he dominated the early Geinojin Sportsman shows until Naoki Iketani showed up). Kane moved to Japan to try to make it on his own, away from the shadow of his father Sho Kosugi (well-known by teen-aged boys of the 80s for being a ninja). Part of Kinniku Banzuke was about Kane going around and trying different things like being a stunt man or going through SWAT training. In the following clip, we see him learning martial arts at the Shaolin Temple:



And here's an interview from 2003 with Hawaii's Eye-Ai magazine.

Omori Akira AKA Monkkiki (he changed his name to jump-start his career based on advice by that fortune teller lady who's always telling people that they should have died some time or that they will die because of..something) was also a regular in the early days of Kinniku Banzuke. He even went to learn Muay Thai kickboxing for the show. As far as I know, G4 has never aired any part of the first SASUKE competition so we don't know much about it. In the following clip, I assume that the first 40 seconds of this is part of his run in the 1st show as his contestant number matches that found in the SASUKE wikipedia entry and he makes it to the final stage:



Couple of other SASUKE related notes:
The cast of the Muscle Musical will once again perform during NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen.

Some other competitors for the Sportsman No. 1 show on New Years Day aside from Ronaldinho, Paul ANTHONY Terek and Wakky are Nakayama Kinnikun, handball player Miyazaki Daisuke (who won Sportsman No. 1 in 2006), football player Kinoshita Noriaki (NFL Europe) and San Francisco Giants outfielder Rajai Davis.

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