‘Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV’: the show that preceded TikTok culture
Thanks entirely to the internet and social media eras, attention spans seem to be getting shorter by the day. Not to sound like a belligerent member of the old guard, but things have reached a point where plenty of absolute and objectionable heathens have decided the best way to watch movies is at either 1.2 or 1.5 speed to quicken the process, ruin the filmmaker’s intentions, and ensure they don’t get bored.
It’s madness for people of multiple generations to even contemplate watching film or television content at a speed different from the one it was developed, written, filmed, edited, and distributed to be shown. Still, with TikTok increasing the preference for short-form clips and easily digestible nuggets of entertainment, it was a tragic inevitability that widespread brain-rot would start to set in eventually.
Millie Bobby Brown – one of Gen Z’s leading lights after headlining Stranger Things, Enola Holmes, and Damsel to great success on Netflix – admitted to The Sun that despite being an actor and producer, she doesn’t watch movies. “People come up to me and say, ‘You should definitely watch this movie, it would change your life,'” she said. “And I’m like, ‘How long do I have to sit there for?.'” If that isn’t illustrative of the widening gap, then nothing is.
Before things devolve fully into full-blown ‘old man yells at cloud’ territory, even the elder statesmen going square-eyed are guilty of becoming engrossed in an unrelated series of skits performed by willing and unwilling participants alike. This eventually snowballed into a worldwide television juggernaut that was adopted, remade, and repackaged in countless countries.
Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV may not mean much in isolation, but pangs of nostalgia will surely arise knowing it’s the basis for shows including America’s Funniest Home Videos and You’ve Been Framed. These are staples of a bygone era when people would record somebody doing something so ridiculous it became entertaining, send a tape through the post to a TV studio, and then bide their time to discover if and when their clip would be beamed to a nationwide audience.
Starring Ken Shimura and Cha Kato, the original iteration wouldn’t only capitalise on the increased availability and popularity of the camcorder to play homemade videos on which the hosts would pass judgment, comment, and occasionally ridicule. Still, the series featured plenty of irreverent skits designed to gently mock aspects of current Japanese society.
It’s not quite a like-for-like comparison, but at its essence, Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV was doing TikTok before TikTok was even a twinkle in Zhang Yiming’s eye. The platform is rife with candid videos, clout-chasing displays of overconfidence, and footage plucked from everyday life readily made available to a captive audience of millions, all of which had been staples of Japanese television since the progenitor of the whole shebang first began airing in the mid-1980s.
