Episode #1201 2014.04.20 - Hamada's Cram School

Hot-blooded Hamada Cram School!!
[hide:35c4hp59]熱血 浜田塾!!

https://mega.nz/#!jMsiBCYS

[img:35c4hp59]http://i.imgur.com/libQ1P6.jpg[/img:35c4hp59]
[attachment=0:35c4hp59]Gaki_140420_#1201_Hamada's Cram School.zip[/attachment:35c4hp59][/hide:35c4hp59]

I’m not sure I quite understood this week’s episode. I think I’d find it much funnier with subs. That said, has gsupanther-sama produced any more subs after their lightning-fast release of the subs for Kiki Chili Oil back in December? In the short period after their debut, I got up hope that the community might have gained a subber for each new weekly episode, but, of course, consistency is the biggest failing of web-based volunteerism, and so I assume gsupanther got too busy to undertake such a large workload. Not that I mind, of course; I value every single subbing job, even the shortest of clips, and am slowly teaching myself Japanese so that I can eventually begin subbing for this community, but I nevertheless feel that some Gaki episodes would benefit more from subs than others, and that this episode is one of them. I suppose this looks like a plea for subs, but I’ve been on this forum long enough to know better than that - all of our subbers graciously do what they do for us completely in their spare time, without monetary compensation, so it’s no surprise that releases are few and far between, and the fantasy of each week’s new episode being subbed before the next one comes out remains just that - a fantasy.

Perhaps one way to accelerate subbers’ releases would be for the community to support them as patrons using Patreon, which I discovered recently. Basically, the way Patreon works is an artisan or other content creator makes a profile, and then their fans can visit their profile and choose to support that artisan by paying them a set amount of money per month, so the content creator will be able to work faster, get better equipment, even quit their job to work on their craft full-time, etcetera. I feel that this method could work for our subber/viewer community here, because (a) the money [i:5uatugiv]is[/i:5uatugiv] out there, because off the top of my head, I know that both TeamGaki and GodzillaRadio receive donations from fans, because they publicly post the amounts of the donations they receive; and (b) the ratio of subbers (content creators) to viewers (content consumers) is very low, especially since last year, so our community is a good "shape" for supporting our subbers this way.

This post might be in the wrong section, but I got the idea as I was thinking about this episode, and I think it’s quite relevant to the needs of our community here.

Good episode, I was glad Cocorico and Housei were in the class to get some abuse :rofl:

I wonder whose bright idea it was to have that same little clip of them shouting the title of the episode play every 5 minutes though? Man… that got annoying.

Yeah subs is always nice… If you want a vague understanding of what an upcoming Gaki episode will be about though you can try running the TV guide summary description through a translator and reading between the lines (usually there is just dummy text until about Thursday or Friday when it gets updated when NTV reveal what the episode will be:

http://tv.so-net.ne.jp/schedulesBySearc ... C%E7%B4%A2

After the episode airs Yahoo TV Japan also posts a summary of what happened:

http://tvtopic.goo.ne.jp/program/94/136/1.html

(click on the ダウンタウンのガキの使いやあらへんで!! links to see)
Here’s my rough interpretation of the first few lines of the Yahoo Japan summary:

[quote:2xoeovdu]The peaceful blur of contemporary Japan is full of wimpy men. And so a hot-blooded teacher arose, much loved by his students.

Introducing the participant members of Hamada’s cram school. First, Tsukitei Housei, who comments that they initially heard there were to be 15 people. It’s explained that the spirit is more susceptible with just 8 people. In voicing doubt at the cram school he received a slap from the principal.[/quote:2xoeovdu]

This was an interesting episode :D (those wigs lol)
but I wonder why it’s ‘Hamada juku’ and not ‘Downtown juku’

My favourite part is when [hide:2gycq7ih]Matsumoto teases Hamada at the blindfold manjuu section. That was hilarious![/hide:2gycq7ih]

I think it might be a parody of Otoko juku

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakigake!!_Otokojuku

Aside from the blindfold-manju scene, I thought this was a pretty boring episode. And no, understanding it didn’t make it much funnier except for the origin of the last section.
[hide:2m6zwz27]Hamada used to do it in the past; he hit his little sister with a wet towel on the way home from the public bath[/hide:2m6zwz27].
It just another of those shallow excuses for Hamada to "interact" with the usual guys.

[quote="Ni Oxx":2m6zwz27] [/quote:2m6zwz27]
I don’t remember if I’ve commented on this subject here before, but when it comes to fan subbing, I really think people should not do it for money. Donation boxes are fine, but anything further than that is pretty low (adlinks are barely fine, but still a major pain in the ass for the end-user). The reason fan subs exist in the first place is that fans want to share something for other fans because a commercial localization doesn’t exist. It is already illegal and morally questionable, but asking money for it makes it just as loathable as selling copied DVDs or physical third-party knock-off items.
Trying to to make a full-time living with fan subbing is absolutely ridiculous. If you really want to make money, you’re probably better off taking requests for H-manga translations.

[quote="Penguinator":n9c699j4]When it comes to fan subbing, I really think people should not do it for money. The reason fan subs exist in the first place is that fans want to share something for other fans because a commercial localization doesn’t exist. It is already illegal and morally questionable, but asking money for it makes it just as loathable as selling copied DVDs or physical third-party knock-off items.[/quote:n9c699j4]
You are completely correct here, Penguinator. I was so blinded by my lust for subs that I completely forgot about [i:n9c699j4]why[/i:n9c699j4] we sub, and, more practically, about the nebula of copyright laws swarming around fansubbing which let us make our fansubs (read: tolerate our fansubbing activities because prosecuting subbers is more trouble than it’s worth). And you are right again on the legal front, because as far as I know, it’s illegal to (directly) make money off of someone else’s copyrighted work, even if you are just subbing or scanlating it.

To take that last point further,

[quote="Penguinator":n9c699j4]Donation boxes are fine, but anything further than that is pretty low (adlinks are barely fine, but still a major pain in the ass for the end-user).[/quote:n9c699j4]
I agree again. Though I recognize that it’s natural to desire a tangible compensation of some sort for the large investment of time that goes into producing subtitles for even a few-minute-long clip, I dislike the use of adlinks (though I tolerate them anyway), and I also believe them to be illegal to use in the manner that is popular with many subbers - that is, where the adlink is being used as a gate through which a viewer [i:n9c699j4]must[/i:n9c699j4] pass to see the video - because the subber is then effectively selling their subs (directly making money off of the video they have subbed), which is against the law, even though the money the subber is receiving does not come out of the viewer’s pocket. Of course, donation boxes don’t have this problem, because when a fan voluntarily donates to a subber, it’s because they wish to support that subber and their work in general, that is, the donator isn’t directly "buying" the subber’s work, and so I think that donation boxes are on the permissible side of the copyright gray area, and I encourage their use.

That is to say, my above Patreon idea can’t work, for much the same reasons that make using adlinks questionable; because even though supporting a subber as their patron would be wholly voluntary (just as donating to their donation box would be), the structure of the Patreon business model would make the subber’s releases of subs more or less a direct purchase, because on Patreon, patrons support an artisan specifically for them to do their chosen craft, not to support their work more generally. It’s kind of a subtle distinction, but I think it is a legitimate one.

Ideally it’d be great if NTV partnered with a site that ran ads on it that could also partner with the subber. That’s what the Youtube/Google and Twitch TV Partnership programs are about. It allows people to profit on work they don’t originally own (e.g. video games) whilst giving the copyright holders a slice of the ad revenue pie. I even think there are now some full movies and TV series you can watch legally on Youtube because a few film/TV distributors have cottoned on how to profit on online streaming through ads. Same as they would do on their self-run catch-up/on-demand websites. But Youtube/Twitch etc. has a big viewerbase for them to tap into. NTV get with the program! ;)

That’s a good idea, soudou, but we often forget how small our community - which consists mostly of people who watch Gaki, but need subtitles to enjoy it to its fullest because they can’t understand Japanese (and thus also live outside Japan) - really is. I’m going to give an optimistic estimate and guess that out of the many tens of thousands of accounts that have been created on this forum over the years, less than a thousand of those people actually watch Gaki weekly. Of course, that number could easily increase by an order of magnitude or more if the episodes began to air on, say, Youtube with (good-quality) subtitles, but still, compared to the [i:3uzr2991]millions[/i:3uzr2991] of people who watch Gaki each week in Japan (without subs, of course :p), our pool of prospective viewers would still be a drop in the bucket.

Of course, I’d love for NTV to do this kind of thing as much as anyone else, and it’s certainly technically possible, but producing (decent) subtitles in a timely manner would cost money, whether done in-house at NTV or by contracting with outside subbers (such as the handful who participate here), and I’m not sure that NTV would be willing to shell out subbing money to appeal to an audience of just a few tens of thousands of viewers. Who knows, maybe subbed Gaki would go viral in the English-speaking world, and get a million views each week, but I feel that if NTV thought that was a possibility, they would’ve already done this kind of thing. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s not like Japanese shows haven’t been successfully brought to the west before (Iron Chef, MXC/Takeshi’s Castle, and Silent Library come to mind), but you’ll notice that all of the shows I named are dubbed, and of the three, Iron Chef is the only show where the show’s original premise, content, and cast were retained intact. For example, when MXC was made, though the footage of the Takeshi’s Castle show was used, the original show was unrecognizable - each of the challenge segments was mixed up into a different order, the dub was a gag dub, the original plot of contestants trying to invade the eponymous castle was eschewed, and Beat Takeshi’s role as the king of the castle was never mentioned, despite him being prominent in Japanese comedy, especially at the time. Similarly, while Silent Library’s premise was carried over to its western incarnation little changed, the handful of episodes that Downtown and company recorded were never broadcast in the west.

On the other hand, it seems that shows which are not comedies, but are nonetheless still amusing, such as Iron Chef and Ninja Warrior/Sasuke, can survive the jump with as little as a dub - in fact, the localization staff of Iron Chef even stopped re-dubbing Chairman Kaga as the American audience become more familiar with the show, opting to simply subtitle him in later seasons. Or maybe they just didn’t want to pay for a dubbing actor for a character who only speaks for a few minutes in each episode, who knows. Either way, it seems like Japanese comedy shows generally aren’t brought across the Pacific without extensive changes, as evidenced by MXC and Silent Library. Of course, all of the shows I mentioned were brought from television to television, whereas soudou’s idea would bring Gaki from television to Youtube/the internet, and the outcome might be more to our liking. Who knows, maybe subbed Gaki really could find success on Youtube, or even air in the late night slot on Cartoon Network/Toonami or Comedy Central, etc.

TL;DR: I want this to happen too, but it probably won’t.

NTV could even save a big amount of money only to pay fan subbers to sub their videos and air them on a web stream thingie instead of airing subbed peisodes of Gaki on TV channels like ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.

Only they should realize Gaki has many fans outside of Japan so they could air legal subbed episodes.

Yeah, I imagine there’s a large majority who likely don’t even know those guys who get their butt slapped each year do a show together every Sunday. Though without subs, understandably most won’t care either.

It would suck if they tried to just make a Western remake, as has been shown. And if they cut up the show heavily, diminishing the role of the cast, it’d lose a lot of appeal since what drew me in, without knowing Japanese, is their interactions/relationship with each other outside the batsu. Dubbing is OK (with subs as an option) though the delivery of the Gaki guys gags are helped by their voices…

Late night here some subtitled stuff does get shown, foreign films on Film 4 for example. But a film is a one-shot thing and like you say Gaki is a weekly show, so there’s a lot more work involved… It’d be good if they could even select certain series to release as compilations. Like how the Kiki series has gotten a lot of awareness from casual viewers.

It was mentioned that the Japanese TV show GameCenter CX got an official subtitled release by Fuji TV using the work of a fansubber from the SomethingAwful forums. At the time of that news, the Gaki crew had started doing their Retro Gaming series. So I was like "Hope some of those subbers come over here!". Even if people don’t know the guys, they know the games and can come to enjoy the way the Gaki guys interact, but alas. To be fair I doubt they would even know such Gaki episodes exist.

[quote="Ni Oxx":i0hyhchv]I’m not sure I quite understood this week’s episode. I think I’d find it much funnier with subs. That said, has gsupanther-sama produced any more subs after their lightning-fast release of the subs for Kiki Chili Oil back in December? [/quote:i0hyhchv]

I haven’t… I enjoyed doing it to a degree, and wouldn’t be completely opposed to subbing another episode if the right one came along… I just want to make sure I’m not missing out important details when I try to sub something. Like for this episode we’re commenting on, I think they’re parodying something? But I have no idea what. So I wouldn’t want to sub this one at all.

The one thing that you have going for you is that I just lost my job, so I’ll have some more time on my hands, at least for awhile. :worried:

[quote="gsupanther":jgpccv0h]I wouldn’t be completely opposed to subbing another episode if the right one came along.[/quote:jgpccv0h]
(Ni Oxx whispers to you) The entire Kiki Series hasn’t been subbed yet ;) , though of course, your job search should probably come first at the present time. Either way, I’m glad to see you’re still active here.

Hi Ernie-San

Can you please renew this episode for me? it DL seems expired. Thank you

[quote="potemkin123":25v8xecx]Hi Ernie-San

Can you please renew this episode for me? it DL seems expired. Thank you[/quote:25v8xecx]
I fixed it. :bow:

[quote="ErnieYoung":3kohfi99][quote="potemkin123":3kohfi99]Hi Ernie-San

Can you please renew this episode for me? it DL seems expired. Thank you[/quote:3kohfi99]
I fixed it. :bow:[/quote:3kohfi99]

Could you please provide the key to unlock the file?