TAR14, eps 1 to 3
Mar. 7th, 2009 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsSo, after taking S13 off (recap-wise anyway), I've got a fresh start for a new season. And apparently, it's the same with the race itself.
Ep 1:
1. First things first, we've got new graphics (even a new font for on-screen captions; while the yellow dialog captions remain the same) and a re-done opening. No comment on the new graphics, but as for the new opening, they've remixed the old opening theme and given it a decent dance beat.
2. And now they're using Google Maps to create those graphics that show where they're going. We're leading off with a trip to Locarno. Unlike other seasons where racers simply just flew to their destination and did their stuff, this season sees them connecting via train after landing in either Milan or Zurich first. Oh, and they're apparently also cutting down on the airport drama, since we get like one minute of flight discussion.
3. After an overnight camp stay, the first real task is to find a dam based on a given photo. It's a nice throwback to earlier seasons where they'd be given something that related to the next stop rather than just spelling it out.
4. Dam, with a roadblock asking "Who has nerves of steel?" I'll give you one guess as to what they could be doing at such a high dam. Okay, so it's bungee jumping, and while the race has had many changes, one thing remains the same: Bungee jumping = acrophobia drama.
5. Okay, now to talk about the teams themselves. Noteworthy (read: unusual) teams this go-round include a pair of 4 1/2' feet brother stuntmen (Mark/Michael), screenwriter/actor Mike White (School of Rock) and his dad, and a mom and her deaf kid (Margie/Luke). The latter isn't the first team with a handicap, since a deaf guy won TARA2, and TAR US had a racer with a prosthetic a few years back. There's also a team from Boca Raton (my old hometown!) in the mix too.
6. Back to the show, and there's a nice new trick taken out of 24: A split screen to transition between two events, for example, some teams boarding trains for Interlaken while the stragglers do their bungee jumps.
7. Interlaken, where the next task is to deliver 200 lbs. of cheese using wooden racks. Up and down a hill I might add. Cue hilarious scenes of racks breaking, racers tripping, butts scooting, cheese rolling downhill, and drunk locals laughing. Good times, good times. At least one racer even claims that he'll never eat cheese again :-)
8. The pitstop involves listening for yodelers. Your winners are Margie/Luke (how's that for ironic?) followed closely by Tammy/Victor (Asian lawyer siblings). And as a nice touch, Phil even signs their 1st place arrival.
9. At the other end of the pack, we've got Christie/Jodi (blonde flight attendants), who took an earlier train out of Locarno but wound up in Interlaken behind everyone else (it always seems to work that way, doesn't it?) racing Preston/Jennifer (dating couple) to the mat. Or rather, racing Jennifer piggyback-riding Preston. Flight attendants scrape through, and we say goodbye to the dating couple.
Ep 2:
1. After some airport drama, we're in Munich, with a Roadblock asking, "Who's ready to fly like an eagle?" But as it happens, wind conditions means that almost all the racers choose run to run down the hill to the cluebox instead of paragliding; and the only reason Mike White's dad Mel isn't running is because he has an aching groin. Mel's long wait gives him time to wax about how the main upstairs has so many other things to do (why does that sound familiar?). Mel ends up the only racer to paraglide, and he's in 5th after the Roadblock. Meanwhile, Linda (the female half of a married couple from Virginia) misses an arrow marker and gets so lost, she finds her way on some roadside and has to hitchhike back to the course. Yipes.
2. Our first Detour of season has a choice between throwing cakes at a "target" and riding a Segway on a two-mile obstacle course. Tammy/Victor are the first to discover that they're supposed to throw cakes at each other. Hilarity ensues. And for the 2nd leg running, there are locals laughing at the contestants.
3. After the Detour, the next task is to get a small piece of wood from mechanical woodcutters, stamped with the next pit stop (some mansion in Salzburg where they filmed "The Sound of Music"). It was uneventful for most teams, but the flight attendants mis-interpreted the "Time to hoof it" as the top of the clue as having to go to a stable. The fact it was dark by the time they got to that point didn't help matters either.
4. Salzburg mansion, and the lawyer sibs are first, while Mel/Mike get an eyebrow for needing help to open a simple iron gate (they were actually supposed to run around a different route), while the flight attendants scrape through again, and we say goodbye to the Virginia spouses.
Ep 3:
1. Interestingly, this week's opening recap not only seemed to be a random patchwork for the first two episodes, there was even a clip of the lawyers getting lost in a forest. We'll get there when we get there. Anyways, next stop is Romania, where the first task is a Roadblock asking, "Who's ready to unleash their inner Nadia?" The task is doing a bunch of gymnastic routines (balance beam, parallel bars floor exercises) to judges' approval (as per usual with this kind of task, their standards weren't really that high). Highlights: Luke signing "I don't wear girls' clothes" and Victor yelling at Tammy during her routine.
2. But before that, our first major airport drama of the season. The lawyers get technical problems on their early flight and end up on a flight with many of the lower-placed teams, while Brad/Victoria (another old married couple) try a flight with a tight connection through Amsterdam. Their flight to Amsterdam gets delayed and since they don't have second thoughts about their choice, they find that they won't be getting their connection until morning when they get to a fogged-in Schiphol.
3. And as if that weren't enough for B/V, everyone else gets to do their gymnastics in the night, and by the time B/V even get out of Schiphol at 9:15, everyone else is on the 6:30 train to Transylvania. (Insert thunder and Dracula music here)
4. Hmm, seems like Jamie/Cara (Boca redhead cheerleaders) have a little taxi trouble on their way to the Detour: "Why are we driving on the sidewalk?" :-) Your Detour choice this week: Move a bunch of stuff for some gypsies, or drag out a coffin and impale a bunch of wooden frames to find a TAR flag. And for the third leg in a row, more inebriated locals laughing, this time at the gypsy Detour.
5. In the gypsy half of the Detour, we have racers piling on lots of random junk on to a horse carriage and catching any that fall while they're following it. The biggest issue is Amanda/Kris (random couple, pronounced the same as another random couple from season 4) misplacing their fanny pack with their passports and money.
6. The real drama is in the coffin half of the Detour: while everyone else gets to the proper spot, the lawyers end up on the wrong path after big brother Victor sees a whole bunch of white and red blaze markers painted on trees. It takes until they encounter a two-headed arrow that he realizes he may have been wrong. And as if that weren't enough, when they do get to the task, it requires opening a series of locks along a long chain, and they waste time looking for a lost key. Ouch.
7. The pit stop is a villa that overlooks Vlad the Impaler's castle, and Mike White and dad (groin injury and all) take advantage of the missing fannypack to beat A/K to the mat, winning a trip to Costa Rica. (Hey, it could have been much worse for A/K...) The stuntmen beat the flight attendants in a footrace to claim 5th, and B/V do the coffin detour in the dark and are bloodied up by the time they're eliminated.
Next episode: Siberia.
Ep 1:
1. First things first, we've got new graphics (even a new font for on-screen captions; while the yellow dialog captions remain the same) and a re-done opening. No comment on the new graphics, but as for the new opening, they've remixed the old opening theme and given it a decent dance beat.
2. And now they're using Google Maps to create those graphics that show where they're going. We're leading off with a trip to Locarno. Unlike other seasons where racers simply just flew to their destination and did their stuff, this season sees them connecting via train after landing in either Milan or Zurich first. Oh, and they're apparently also cutting down on the airport drama, since we get like one minute of flight discussion.
3. After an overnight camp stay, the first real task is to find a dam based on a given photo. It's a nice throwback to earlier seasons where they'd be given something that related to the next stop rather than just spelling it out.
4. Dam, with a roadblock asking "Who has nerves of steel?" I'll give you one guess as to what they could be doing at such a high dam. Okay, so it's bungee jumping, and while the race has had many changes, one thing remains the same: Bungee jumping = acrophobia drama.
5. Okay, now to talk about the teams themselves. Noteworthy (read: unusual) teams this go-round include a pair of 4 1/2' feet brother stuntmen (Mark/Michael), screenwriter/actor Mike White (School of Rock) and his dad, and a mom and her deaf kid (Margie/Luke). The latter isn't the first team with a handicap, since a deaf guy won TARA2, and TAR US had a racer with a prosthetic a few years back. There's also a team from Boca Raton (my old hometown!) in the mix too.
6. Back to the show, and there's a nice new trick taken out of 24: A split screen to transition between two events, for example, some teams boarding trains for Interlaken while the stragglers do their bungee jumps.
7. Interlaken, where the next task is to deliver 200 lbs. of cheese using wooden racks. Up and down a hill I might add. Cue hilarious scenes of racks breaking, racers tripping, butts scooting, cheese rolling downhill, and drunk locals laughing. Good times, good times. At least one racer even claims that he'll never eat cheese again :-)
8. The pitstop involves listening for yodelers. Your winners are Margie/Luke (how's that for ironic?) followed closely by Tammy/Victor (Asian lawyer siblings). And as a nice touch, Phil even signs their 1st place arrival.
9. At the other end of the pack, we've got Christie/Jodi (blonde flight attendants), who took an earlier train out of Locarno but wound up in Interlaken behind everyone else (it always seems to work that way, doesn't it?) racing Preston/Jennifer (dating couple) to the mat. Or rather, racing Jennifer piggyback-riding Preston. Flight attendants scrape through, and we say goodbye to the dating couple.
Ep 2:
1. After some airport drama, we're in Munich, with a Roadblock asking, "Who's ready to fly like an eagle?" But as it happens, wind conditions means that almost all the racers choose run to run down the hill to the cluebox instead of paragliding; and the only reason Mike White's dad Mel isn't running is because he has an aching groin. Mel's long wait gives him time to wax about how the main upstairs has so many other things to do (why does that sound familiar?). Mel ends up the only racer to paraglide, and he's in 5th after the Roadblock. Meanwhile, Linda (the female half of a married couple from Virginia) misses an arrow marker and gets so lost, she finds her way on some roadside and has to hitchhike back to the course. Yipes.
2. Our first Detour of season has a choice between throwing cakes at a "target" and riding a Segway on a two-mile obstacle course. Tammy/Victor are the first to discover that they're supposed to throw cakes at each other. Hilarity ensues. And for the 2nd leg running, there are locals laughing at the contestants.
3. After the Detour, the next task is to get a small piece of wood from mechanical woodcutters, stamped with the next pit stop (some mansion in Salzburg where they filmed "The Sound of Music"). It was uneventful for most teams, but the flight attendants mis-interpreted the "Time to hoof it" as the top of the clue as having to go to a stable. The fact it was dark by the time they got to that point didn't help matters either.
4. Salzburg mansion, and the lawyer sibs are first, while Mel/Mike get an eyebrow for needing help to open a simple iron gate (they were actually supposed to run around a different route), while the flight attendants scrape through again, and we say goodbye to the Virginia spouses.
Ep 3:
1. Interestingly, this week's opening recap not only seemed to be a random patchwork for the first two episodes, there was even a clip of the lawyers getting lost in a forest. We'll get there when we get there. Anyways, next stop is Romania, where the first task is a Roadblock asking, "Who's ready to unleash their inner Nadia?" The task is doing a bunch of gymnastic routines (balance beam, parallel bars floor exercises) to judges' approval (as per usual with this kind of task, their standards weren't really that high). Highlights: Luke signing "I don't wear girls' clothes" and Victor yelling at Tammy during her routine.
2. But before that, our first major airport drama of the season. The lawyers get technical problems on their early flight and end up on a flight with many of the lower-placed teams, while Brad/Victoria (another old married couple) try a flight with a tight connection through Amsterdam. Their flight to Amsterdam gets delayed and since they don't have second thoughts about their choice, they find that they won't be getting their connection until morning when they get to a fogged-in Schiphol.
3. And as if that weren't enough for B/V, everyone else gets to do their gymnastics in the night, and by the time B/V even get out of Schiphol at 9:15, everyone else is on the 6:30 train to Transylvania. (Insert thunder and Dracula music here)
4. Hmm, seems like Jamie/Cara (Boca redhead cheerleaders) have a little taxi trouble on their way to the Detour: "Why are we driving on the sidewalk?" :-) Your Detour choice this week: Move a bunch of stuff for some gypsies, or drag out a coffin and impale a bunch of wooden frames to find a TAR flag. And for the third leg in a row, more inebriated locals laughing, this time at the gypsy Detour.
5. In the gypsy half of the Detour, we have racers piling on lots of random junk on to a horse carriage and catching any that fall while they're following it. The biggest issue is Amanda/Kris (random couple, pronounced the same as another random couple from season 4) misplacing their fanny pack with their passports and money.
6. The real drama is in the coffin half of the Detour: while everyone else gets to the proper spot, the lawyers end up on the wrong path after big brother Victor sees a whole bunch of white and red blaze markers painted on trees. It takes until they encounter a two-headed arrow that he realizes he may have been wrong. And as if that weren't enough, when they do get to the task, it requires opening a series of locks along a long chain, and they waste time looking for a lost key. Ouch.
7. The pit stop is a villa that overlooks Vlad the Impaler's castle, and Mike White and dad (groin injury and all) take advantage of the missing fannypack to beat A/K to the mat, winning a trip to Costa Rica. (Hey, it could have been much worse for A/K...) The stuntmen beat the flight attendants in a footrace to claim 5th, and B/V do the coffin detour in the dark and are bloodied up by the time they're eliminated.
Next episode: Siberia.
