‘Banzai’ -- a controversy by Fox

With the flap over a “Charlie Chan” film festival still fresh in the minds of Asian American activists, along comes “Banzai” -- a broad parody of Japanese game shows that has managed to spur criticism even before its Sunday premiere on Fox, drawing complaints for stereotypical images and the narrator’s over-the-top Asian accent.

Yet aimed as it is at the semiliterate crowd watching MTV’s “Jackass,” “Banzai” raises different questions than the Chan festival, which the subscription Fox Movie Channel suspended after complaints about the “yellow face” (white actors playing the great Chinese sleuth) used in those films of the 1930s and ‘40s.

Hardly a novice when it comes to playing “rope-a-dope” with the media or wearing insensitivity on its sleeve, Fox doubtlessly assumes a bit of tumult regarding “Banzai” will generate welcome buzz for an offbeat, at-times irresistibly silly premise tailored to viewers with short attention spans. Having enjoyed considerable success in the United Kingdom, this British import offers a series of rapid-fire stunts and contests, urging viewers, “Place bets now!” before, say, a one-legged soccer player tries scoring a goal against a one-armed goalie or a priest, a rabbi and “The Incredible Hulk’s” Lou Ferrigno stage an endurance test on stationary bikes.

If those segments sound like something concocted by frat boys after too many beers, that’s not far from the truth. Series creator Gary Monaghan says the idea began percolating with the idiotic bets guys contemplate “in a pub with friends, and it kind of got a bit out of hand.”

To lock in its target audience of teenage boys and young men, Fox has incorporated an Internet component letting viewers keep score of how often they guess correctly -- a melding of TV and video games. (For legal reasons, Fox can’t participate in actual wagering, but if viewers at home want to get “very drunk” and toss around a few bucks among themselves, Monaghan says that’s OK by him.)

What makes “Banzai” irksome to some Asian Americans is the thickly accented Japanese narrator and images of Asian actors who make contorted faces and strike martial arts poses. Granted, the show spoofs Japanese programs, but given the obscurity of that source and Asians’ near invisibility elsewhere on television, activists aren’t amused.

“Asians are kind of conditioned to cringe and go, ‘OK, what are they going to do? They’re going to make fun of us,’ ” said Guy Aoki, founder of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, who added that TV “rarely shows Asian Americans as regular people.... There’s nothing to balance it out.”

Compared with other groups, Aoki says, Asians are less apt to complain about such perceived slights. That said, those who are insulted have every right to be -- especially in the context of how absurdly overlooked Asians are when TV depicts everyday areas where they should be very well represented, such as medicine.

Still, watching something as clearly inane as “Banzai,” it’s hard not to think there are bigger and better battles to fight -- that set against the overall drift of prime time, this show isn’t any more demeaning to Asians than “For Love or Money” and “Big Brother 4” are to, well, everybody.

Moreover, if we must expunge from TV every racially or politically insensitive video image produced before the Johnson administration, where do you draw the line? Does Fox Movie Channel’s action mean early westerns can’t be broadcast because Native Americans were both presented heinously and mostly played by white guys? Should “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” land on the scrap heap because you rightfully wince at Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a bucktoothed Asian neighbor?

These aren’t easy questions, but if there’s a place for logic in this debate, interest groups should focus on the present as opposed to an imperfect past that can be edited but not erased, while networks must prove they are committed to more than merely superficial progress.

Putting issues of race aside, “Banzai” (parts of which aired previously on USA Network) can be a bit tasteless in other ways -- including a stunt with a chicken that won’t win any friends among animal-rights groups. On the flip side, it’s hard not to laugh at “Lady One Question,” who stoically watches interview subjects fidget uncomfortably, or “Hand Shake Man,” who clasps onto celebrities and won’t let go, the “bet” being how long Bill Murray or Kelsey Grammer will politely endure the literal arm-twisting.

Monaghan points out that the series played in the U.K. -- a less heterogeneous society -- without fuss and can’t fathom why Asian accents would be objectionable when there are in fact people who talk that way. He characterizes “Banzai” as nothing more than a fantasy world “where any extreme gambling possibility is possible.”

Of course, Fox could have helped defuse the situation by simply dubbing in an Asian American narrator minus the zany accent, but why bother when a mere pinch of outrage can be just the ingredient to transform summer piffle into grist for the publicity mill -- the kind of 21st century recipe that doesn’t require a great detective to recognize.