Your Next K-pop Star: Tarzan

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(written on March 11, 2024)

A few essays ago, I mentioned that Monsta X had been formed on a survival reality show and how that seemed like a bizarre way to form a musical group.  

I wrote that opinion because here in America, survival reality shows involve dropping people into the middle of nowhere and hoping they don’t die.  Contestants eat bugs, search for water, build shelters, and engage in brutal arguments with their fellow contestants over which ones are just there for Instagram followers and which ones are there for the “right reasons.”  The “right reasons” vary from show to show, and honestly there are no right reasons to be on an American survival reality show, unless your reason is that you have a death wish and want to go out by being disemboweled by wolverines on national television.

Since then, I’ve learned that TAN was also formed on a Korean survival reality show.  So were other K-poppers on my playlist, such as Stray Kids, Pentagon, Enhypen, 2pm, and Seventeen.  For both boy and girl groups, survival shows are a pretty common method of assembling K-pop groups.  Which can’t be right.  To my American mind, thinking of American survival shows, that makes no sense.

Musical artists get crowned on American reality competition shows all the time, which are different from survival shows.  After each round of singing, they get insulted to their faces by celebrity judges, and then they go backstage and, I assume, argue over who is there for the right reasons, until they get dragged back onstage for a new musical theme week. 

Fun fact:  Canadian Idol had a Gordon Lightfoot theme week, which I’m really sorry I didn’t see.  I like to think it was the show’s longest episode due to all the contestants trading every single verse of all six and a half minutes of “The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald.”  And yes, that song was only six and a half minutes long and not the six and a half hours I remember it being when I was a kid smashing my transistor radio with a hammer to make it stop.

Anyway, back on track.  I found that I can watch some of these Korean reality survival shows on YouTube because some kind soul has uploaded them with English translations.  Browsing through these videos, it looks like No Mercy (the show that brought us Monsta X) is more of a talent competition, like American Idol and The Voice.  On the other hand, Wild Idol (which brought us TAN) is one with actual wilderness challenges.  I found one clip of Wild Idol contestants carrying logs across a river.  Just think, if Jooan and Taehoon had been swept away by rapids, TAN would be a drastically different group.

I decided that I’m going to watch both No Mercy and Wild Idol.  And just for kicks, I’ll see if I can find the Gordon Lightfoot episode of Canadian Idol, because honestly, that would be the North American equivalent of a survival reality show.  If you can get through that episode without losing your mind and hurling yourself over Niagara Falls, you get to be Canada’s next Prime Minister. 

To be continued …  

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