Padding

[darthvaderlim]

Padding in movies, video games, stories, and TV shows are scenes that are drawn out and serves no purpose whatsoever. What are some instances of this is Sasuke? For me, it would be Sasuke 28, with the Box Lady and celebrities' reactions to every runs along with the dinner that most competitors are bored out of their minds. Today's Stage One from 38 onwards are also another example of padding, where it's now 3.5 hours with most of the celebrities and comedians runs being in the 50s and 60s.

[dakohosu]

Jul 24, 2024 3:03:00 GMT -5 darthvaderlim said:

Padding in movies, video games, stories, and TV shows are scenes that are drawn out and serves no purpose whatsoever. What are some instances of this is Sasuke? For me, it would be Sasuke 28, with the Box Lady and celebrities' reactions to every runs along with the dinner that most competitors are bored out of their minds. Today's Stage One from 38 onwards are also another example of padding, where it's now 3.5 hours with most of the celebrities and comedians runs being in the 50s and 60s.

I agree with you in the sense that I think the recent tournaments fall the most foul to this.

Obviously celebrities are necessary to keep the show afloat in this era where game shows are dying and hence celebrity presence is pretty much non-negotiable for Sasuke to stay relevant, but I do really feel like a lot of the celebrity runs are sometimes unnecessarily drawn out.

Ad breaks in the middle of pretty much all of their runs, massive VTRs and fluff pieces before their runs, multiple reactions everytime they clear an obstacle, long replays, and long interviews. This becomes especially egregious around the 50s-60s in recent tournaments where they seem to shoe horn loads of celebrities into that specific spot, leading to a huge pace breaker in the flow of Stage 1. Not to mention that Stage 1 is now 3-3.5 hours long because of all of these drawn out runs compounded, while Stage 2 is 20 minutes, and Stage 3/4 are an hour.

My favorite example of this is Darvish's Stage 3 run in 36, the actual run lasted about what, 15-20 seconds? But his slot lasted a good 10 minutes where there was a reaction everytime he cleared a rung of the Flying Bar, like 5-6 angles shown for his fail, and a REALLY long interview. I'm more forgiving of this one because I like Darvish and he did finally manage to break through that tournament, but I thought it was a little bit ridiculous. 

28 I definitely think had the aforementioned padding, and the dinner was tragically hilarious in the sense that clearly no one wanted to be there, but I do kinda get it because it was Sasuke's revival and they clearly wanted to go into it with a grand return to avoid the show suffering the same fate as it did prior. Though obviously with the editing and All-Star retirement they went about it in the COMPLETE wrong way lol.

[darthvaderlim]

Without the Box Lady and the dinner, how long do you think 28 would be? I think it would be less than 2 hours without the constant interruption from them

[dakohosu]

Jul 25, 2024 5:38:06 GMT -5 darthvaderlim said:

Without the Box Lady and the dinner, how long do you think 28 would be? I think it would be less than 2 hours without the constant interruption from them

Very possibly, I just checked and with no ads the tournament was just over 2 and a half hours.

To be honest I think if there was ever a recent-ish tournament that would've benefitted from a short runtime, it would've been 28. Mainly because the competitive field was full of randos who weren't worth being shown in full, with very few competitors of interest who would actually deserve more screen time (barring those who cleared it was basically Lee, Hashimoto, Wakky, the All-Stars, and that was it....), low clear rates, and Stages 2 and 3 would've hence been more drawn out if they got more time as we already had fluff pieces before every run, replays, interviews etc. Also factor in that a good half hour of the tournament was dedicated to the All-Stars for the whole grand retirement thing which shouldn't have been the case to begin with. 

The tournament would've been better if the All-Stars weren't being retired and hence got more regular edits, no box lady or dinner, and more randos were fast forwarded or cut (we had to wait over half an hour for the first clear, and had only two clears in the first hour). All of these pertain to the tournament being shorter; I honestly reckon with these changes, 28 could've gotten away with like 1.5 hours, because there was so little of substance and so much bloat. Stages 2 and 3 were collectively 45 minutes, leaving 45 minutes for Stage 1, which I honestly wouldn't be adverse to given the above.

It was very obvious that Inui got the broadcast slot, the tournament happened, it sucked content-wise, so they had to pad it out and extend all of the dinner and box sequences just to make it last as long as it needed to to fill the whole slot.