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(Written on March 31, 2024)
Welcome to my second series recap project, one that begs the question: South Korea, are you OK?
Seriously, SK, let’s step out into the hall for just a second. Now look. You do know that you can put bands together through regular auditions, or by letting the bands form naturally through friendships and talent, or even by putting a large group photo of all your trainees on a wall and blindfolding yourself and throwing darts until you’ve hit somewhere between seven and twenty faces?
No, please listen. The dart-throwing thing would be the fastest and least-painful way for everyone involved, and then you get to do what appears to be your favorite thing, which is giving these groups really strange names that are supposed to stand for something but just make your average Western music fan very confused. Here are just a few of the names I found online:
Teen Top: This is
actually a cute band name that doesn’t need to be an acronym. But you decided it stands for (deep
breath) “Teenage Emoboy Emotion Next Generation Talent Object Praise.” SK, I mean this with love: What the hell is wrong with you?
TraxX: This band has changed its name twice. They started as The TRAX and then changed it to TRAX, and now it’s TraxX. The name means “Typhoon Rose Attack Xmas,” which I figured had to be a bunch of talent managers each doing twelve Soju shots and then just smashing their faces on their keyboards until words appeared, but no, the name actually means something. Those words are the English nicknames of the band members, which begs a whole new set of questions which are now irrelevant, as they’ve all quit the band.
UP10TION: I’m guessing this is pronounced “up-ten-shen.” The band has seven members, so of course the band name means “Unbelievable Perfect 10 Members Teenager Idol Open Now.” They started with ten members but then three left and they never bothered to … OK, we get it. SK, stop. Just stop.
It’s hard to find much information about Wild Idol online, but I did find an interesting discussion on Reddit. Apparently, this show was very popular in Korea, but it’s hard to tell if the ratings were good or if a lot of people were just talking about it, making it part of pop culture discourse. Apparently someone is making a lot of money from these band-making reality shows, because there are TONS of them. This makes me wonder how many of these groups actually became successful, but I’ve already wandered way off topic.
Over the next several days, I will be recapping the show Extreme Debut: Wild Idol, which ran on the MBC network from September 17th to December 16th, 2021, so this show is more recent than No Mercy.
Just like with No Mercy,
I already know the outcome and am a fan of the resulting group. However, I am nowhere near as well-informed
about TAN as I am about Monsta X, so I won’t have a lot of insight about the
personalities, group dynamics, and all the other inside information that I had
when recapping No Mercy.
I don’t think that will be a problem, though, as this show will provide plenty of content. We are starting out with 45 contestants. We will end up with seven. Be prepared for many eliminations, hopefully all by judges’ vote and none by poison ivy or being swept over waterfalls, although now that I think about it, that would make a great movie. A trainee falls over a waterfall during a K-pop survival reality show. The body is missing, and he’s presumed dead. But after the winning band debuts, the missing trainee is found alive and demands his spot in the group. Somebody write that.
We will also see Giriboy again as one of the rap mentors, but sadly, no sign of Mad Clown. Other mentors will include members of 2pm, but not the one who can break chopsticks with his butt. That’s probably for the best. This is a wilderness survival show. I did a summer of Girl Scout camp as a kid, and I don’t remember any survival skills they taught us that required chopsticks. Then again, they did spend a lot of time teaching us the lyrics to some camp songs that got me in serious trouble when I sang them in school, so I’m not sure the point of that camp was survival.
Wild Idol will have mentors in several more fields than No Mercy did. Yes, we will have celebrity panelists and professionals in the areas of rap, vocal, and dance, but we will also have Performance Pros and Expression Pros. I can’t wait to see what an Expression Pro is. I literally have no idea what that could be, and I will not be Googling it before watching the show.
What else … the entertainment company behind this show is Think Entertainment, who debuted TAN in March 2022, about three months after the show ended. Also, the band currently pronounces their name as T-A-N, meaning “To All Nations,” but when they first debuted, they pronounced it “tan,” as in the color.
In other fun facts, the show put the theme song out on streaming platforms ahead of the show to drum up publicity. The song is called “Born to be Wild.” I found the official music video. All 45 contestants perform the choreography, and it’s fun to look through and pick out the winners. But what’s really amazing is the photography. We are going to get some beautiful nature settings on this show. I tried to find out where the series was filmed, but everything I found just said, “the wilderness.” I hope we get more information from the show itself.
The music video had the intended effect of getting me excited to see this show. I had to register for a Kocowa streaming service account to watch it subtitled in English, and in the user agreement, I think I may have applied for a trainee position in Think Entertainment. Boy, will they be surprised when I show up.
Let’s do this!
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