Yellow humor caused a sensation on television in the 1990s. Humorous comments about how one hundred contestants faced numerous outdoor tests such as crossing a pond made of diving boards or surviving a suspension bridge while being attacked by balls with the aim of storming a fortress resonated with viewers. Characters like El chino Cudeiro or Dolores Conichigua and tests like Las zamburguesas or Los cañones de Nakasone became very popular.
Some voiceovers that had no relation to the original version and will continue to be so in Takeshi's castle, the return of the format more than three decades later, now with the original name and through Amazon Prime Video. Eight new episodes arrive tomorrow that will feature the voices of Dani Rovira, Eva Soriano and Jorge Ponce, also executive producer along with Javier Valera from Encofrados Encofrasa (La Resistencia).
"The fun of recovering this format was obviously to reinvent each and every one of the phrases," confirms Ponce. "We were asked as a producer to respect aspects of the original version, not to mix episodes and to understand the narrative of the contest, but we have had total freedom for the jokes."
In Takeshi's Castle there is no standard dubbing, but rather an absolute reinterpretation. “I believe that the format would not work otherwise; the spectators want us to invent the movies that happen there”. The imagination of scriptwriters and presenters has given rise to original characters in the Spanish format such as Niña Meloni, the otter, Pichí y Pichá, The recently divorced or Ayuso, in whom Soriano wanted to see a character "who can be someone you know or not". .
Although there are some prepared scripts, afterwards there is a lot of room for improvisation by the three announcers. “We have a wonderful script but in the end there was a lot of improvisation because after so many hours of voice-over you end up with your brain fried and you are no longer so focused on the script but on having a good time”, explains Soriano. "There are also times when we were very tired and it was very good for us that there was already a joke written because suddenly nothing good came to mind," confesses Rovira.
Ponce acknowledges that there were moments that they had to stop because they couldn't stop laughing, as also happened during this interview with La Vanguardia. "Understand us, we spent many hours with interviews but this also happened to us locuting: we were amused by bullshit and we spent 15 minutes that we were not able to follow," confesses Ponce.
Has there been a job to be more politically correct now than in the nineties? “I don't think it's political correctness, but humor advances just like society and in the end there are codes that we ourselves don't have in our way of speaking. Very up-to-date jokes have been made because we already have a code in which this type of humor is not accepted”, answers Soriano.
"Leaving aside the title Yellow Humor, characters like El chino Cudeiro or that way that had the original format of collectivizing all Asians as Chinese, the humor of the nineties program was very white," argues Ponce. “And surreal, absurd and very funny”, adds Rovira while Soriano advances that “in our sample of jokes there are no longer those that in the nineties were accepted within their context”.
In the new episodes there has also been Paco Bravo and Fernando Costilla, the original voices of the nineties. They have also been joined by the "youtuber" Mister Jägger, as the voice of the contest's master of ceremonies, and the comic duo Venga Monjas, in charge of inventing absurd songs for the musical moments of the program and its protagonists, including Takeshi Kitano, the creator of the format and prestigious filmmaker with films such as Kikujiro's Summer and Hana-Bi.
