Fountain of Staged Trivia
Fountain of Trivia [known as Hey! Spring of Trivia in America] was a very popular Japanese TV program that would reveal startling trivia to viewers. While it was still airing every week, I watched it often, and it was one of my favorite TV programs[it no longer airs regularly. Every show had a special segment in which they attempted to create “new trivia” by conducting wacky experiments and finding out the results. While many viewers believed that the program was creating amazing new trivia, cynics and readers of neomarxisme had probably assumed that such segments were staged. Well, it turns out that the cynics were probably right:
The episode in question was broadcast on Sept. 14, 2005. In a section of the broadcast, an experiment was carried out to see how 100 mixed-breed dogs would respond if their owner suddenly collapsed and started rolling about in pain.
One of the dogs in the experiment belonged to a woman, but the show introduced the president of an animal show production agency as the owner. Because members of the show’s production crew had trouble filming the dog when it was on top of the company president, they reportedly put dog food inside his clothes before they shot footage for the program.
“We decided that the company president could be treated as an owner,” a public relations representative from FTV said. “We consider this to be something completely different from staging or fabrication, but we think there are some points we should reflect on and we want to do this.”
I actually watched the episode in question. In most cases, the dogs did simply nothing while their masters were motionless on the ground. There was even a case of a dog that urinated on his master, if I recall correctly. At the time I thought it was hilarious, but now that the fact that at least part of the segment was staged, it really doesn’t seem so amusing anymore. I actually thought that such a segment was what they made it out to be, but it is now clear that it was a fabrication. Calling it anything other than a staging or a fabrication is simply stupid. If they don’t consider such an act to be fabcrication, one can imagine that they also “didn’t fabcricate” many of their other trivia segments. Let’s hope some heads roll at FTV over this one…
