Andy Chase

It occurs to me this morning that the last time I did anything in formal observation of New Year's Eve would have been the last time I attended the First Night celebration in Keene, New Hampshire, which must have been 1993 or 1994 at the latest; I know the city abandoned the festival when I was still in college.

That was a lot of fun, largely because we only lived a couple of miles from the festivities and the drive home was only a couple of minutes; minimal exposure to drunk people on the way home in the middle of the night.

In Los Angeles we'd huddle in our apartment, watching the best of whatever marathon happened to be on that year.

Last night the tradition continued as we watched a few back to back episodes of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' (how festive) and then at 11:00 two episodes of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge ushered in the new year. After a week of being preempted by non-stop James Bond flicks, we finally got our MXC fix. The SpikeTV web page, which makes the show sound like a backyard wrestler wet dream is unfortunately not very representative. True, if watching guys get hit in the groin is your idea of high entertainment you won't be disappointed, but a better comparison would be "Japanese Double-Dare-for-grown-ups style game show gets the MST3K treatment."

So you have two levels of strangeness; the original footage and the dubbed english commentary, rife with double entendres but playing it completely straight.

It works, and it's somehow as addictive as hell... as cheap as the show must be to produce, I hope Spike makes a lot of episodes.