Thursday Movie Picks #229: Adapted from a non-English series

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for yet another TV edition, with the theme being shows adapted from a non-English series. This was a difficult one for me, until I hit upon the bright idea of thinking of game shows yet again. (How many times have I said I don't watch much episodic TV?) With that in mind, here are the three shows:



Countdown (1982-present). Original country: France. An institution in the UK and its native France, this game show asks contestants to take a series of randomly selected letters and come up with the longest word they can, as well as asking them to use the four basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) on numbers to reach the target number. Using only the six numbers provided, did you come up with 867? People who like Scrabble and math love this one; everybody else, probably not so much.



Ultra Quiz (early 1980s). Original country: Japan. In Japan in the days when globe-hopping wasn't quite so common, a popular series of quiz shows took contestants all over the world answering questions in pursuit of the grand prize. Of course, this being Japan, they had to add the twist of sending off losing contestants in humiliating ways. (I recall from the one American Ultra Quiz that they guillotined the luggage of the losing contestants in Paris.) One version of this was tried in the US and quickly forgotten.



1 vs. 100 (2000s). Original country: Netherlands. This show had a lone contestant answer multiple-choice questions against a "mob" of 100 questions that was whittled down by people getting the questions wrong. If the One got a question wrong, the remaining Mob members would split the pot. In the non-US versions, the next contestant would be the person in the Mob who had answered the questions in the shortest amount of time, but the US insisted on gimmicking up yet another show so they could have casting with archetypes, and then adding further gimmicks to try to get jackpot winners.

For the Countdown Numbers Game: 6 * 6 = 36; 36 - 1 = 35; 35 * 25 = 875; 875 - 8 = 867. Get it in 30 seconds?