The Point Radio: Tough Summer For The AMERICAN NINJA

AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR is back for the summer and now on two networks with original episodes on both NBC and G4. Things are much tougher this season and we take you backstage to preview just how rough things will be getting. Plus BOOM expands and The Hoff is coming whether we like it or not. This summer, we are updating once a week – every Friday – but you don’t have to miss any pop culture news. THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

Hello, it's Mike Raub and welcome to The Point where all parts of pop culture come together. It's summertime and it's time to get tough. American Ninja Warrior is back, this time on NBC and on G4 and there are some big changes to make it even harder. We'll tell you how that all works out.

Plus, Boom Studios consolidates and are you ready? Here comes the Hoffs. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point, The Point radio, get The Point radio. American Ninja Warrior is back for a summertime run, this time on NBC and on G4.

And if you think it was difficult for these guys to compete last year, well it's even tougher now with some major changes to the obstacle course as explained by co-host Matt Eiseman. There are always changes to Mount Midoriama as well as all the qualifying courses. That's one of the challenges on American Ninja Warrior is that the competitors never

know what they're going to face. But this year we've had more changes than ever before. In the city competitions that we held, typically one or two obstacles would change in the previous years. But this year we'd have four of six obstacles change.

So some of our competitors were traveling to the early cities to Venice to try to get a sense of what they'd be facing. I think they were a little surprised when they saw virtually brand new courses in each of the following cities that we did, Baltimore, Miami and Denver. So exactly what are these changes?

The Warped Wall came back, but we had things circle cross, rope, just upper body challenges, agility challenges. And I think with that, what we saw too was we have a whole new crop of competitors. It's been amazing looking at the rise of the popularity of American Ninja Warrior. I think last season it really kind of exploded onto the scene.

And this year what we saw was people were coming out camping out a day before two, three, sometimes up to five days ahead of the competition to try to get a walk on spot. And I think that's just a testament to how much the popularity of, well, I think fitness is really making a resurgence. We've seen crossfit and the rise of things like Tough Mudder, but I think American Ninja

Warrior and Mount Midoriama is really the granddad of all the obstacle courses in the world really. So when people want to test themselves, they know the place to do it's American Ninja Warrior. Co-host Jen Brown told me that these obstacle changes do help in some ways. Because we added these new obstacles this year, it really kind of leveled the playing

field a bit. We have a lot of our returning veterans, the famous teams that were so familiar with it from competing on this show. But really by adding new obstacles, it was obstacles they weren't expecting, so therefore they couldn't go and train at all these training facilities on them.

So it really kind of allowed us to have these rookies, these unknown people that came up and were able to really do as well as our veterans. So we had this really great emergence of new means. As you know, the show originated in Japan with an American version coming along later. And now is it possible for an international Ninja competition?

Okay, we're sworn to secrecy, but I will say your idea may be shared by some people in the network, but we're not allowed to comment on anything. Suffice it to say, it is growing and we look, we believe we have the strongest competitors here in America and at some point we would love to prove. As Matt and Jen's co-host, Ag Bar, explained to me each of the hosts tried out the course

on their own. I kind of was a little arrogant. I looked at the course like this is going to be easy. So I said, well, let me at least just try to work the wall because this is nothing. You know, I'd back with big guys and you know, all this other stuff.

And I took one shot, two shot, three shot and just failed miserably. And I realized that there was more than just, you know, being a strong athlete, they can throw up a bunch of, you know, throw up 400 pounds, you know, squat a whole bunch, leg press 1200 pounds. You had to have, I mean, true athletes have an overall body shot and just be pound to

pound strong in every area. And I just didn't have it. I didn't have it. And so I had a lot of respect and grew a lot of respect for all of the obstacles there. And as it turned out, Jen did the best of all.

When I was first asked to be a part of the show, as soon as I heard about it, I had been a fan and watched it for years. And so the first thing I think I said to the producers when we sat in a meeting was like, can I try the course? And he said, I want to be more than happy, especially because we have the new obstacle

element where we were adding in, as Matt had mentioned, you know, four new obstacles in that qualifying round. And so we kind of came up with a process that I would attempt the course in each city. We wouldn't have me run the entire course. So we pick, you know, one or two new obstacles to kind of demo it.

So I'm not sure where it's going to fall and run in the shows. But I'm pretty proud to say I was able to successfully do three of about six obstacles. But the thing to note by my having success on those is that I was only trying them one at a time. And that was the one thing that I definitely had Matt appreciation for because these guys,

like I tried an obstacle called the spider climb. You climb 30 feet, you led yourself yourself in between literally climb 30 feet up in the air. Now, that was something that I'm five, three and a half about a buck 10 in something like that.

I found to be fairly easy, especially except when you get to the topic, it's a little unnerving. But that's the last obstacle at the end of a course. So so competitors would have done nine obstacles prior to getting to the spider climb. But for someone like me who had no problems doing it, you've got to take into account that you guys would have been doing it at the end of their run.

So, you know, as far as you watch these and you kind of see these ninjas do it and you think, Oh, that doesn't look too hard. But then when you stand out there on the court, it is so different. And and I think it was kind of neat to encourage some of the media to come out and attend the court.

And I think I think it's really important to actually try it. Catch new episodes of American Ninja Warrior with new episodes on G4 on Sundays and NBC on Mondays with different episodes on each network. Get more info right now at NBC dot com. What's going on now in pop culture.

Fox had joined in to announce the return dates of some of their shows for the fall. For example, New Girl and the Mindy Project back on Tuesday, September 17th. Bones returns on the 16th and a Sunday animation block with a Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, Family Guy and American Dad all return on September 29th. The new series premieres on Fox begin on the 16th when Sleepy Hollow premieres right after

Bones. Brooklyn, 99, the Adam Sandberg series comes on the 17th for its premiere and Almost Human premieres on the network on Monday, November the 4th. David Hasselhoff is entering the comic book world. His H.O.F. character will now be the center of a new comic series.

H.O.F. stands for Heroes of Fearless Freedom and the book will premiere in London in a few days. And on the U.S. side it will premiere with David appearing live at Comic Con in a couple of weeks. In another one of those bizarre copyright court cases Mattel has filed a lawsuit against

noted writer Donald Glutt who wrote a treatment and four mini-comics that came out prior to the first Masters of the Universe products back in the day. This past January Glutt had filed a copyright notice claiming that he owned those characters and had leased them to Mattel back in 1981 and that that license was about ready to expire. Mattel's claim is that Glutt was a work for higher talent and that they copyrighted those

original mini-comics back at the time. As summer begins networks have also looked ahead to the fall and began planning their schedules putting up calendars of when the new shows and the returning series will be back on the air. We'll give you a few of these at a time because we don't want to overwhelm you.

We'll start with the CW where things like Beauty and the Beast return on Monday October 7th. The Tomorrow People premieres on Wednesday October 9th on the CW. Vampire Diaries comes back on Thursday October the 10th. The Originals, the Vampire Diaries spin-off comes in on Tuesday the 15th.

Supernatural back for a new season on Tuesday October 15th as well and Arrow returns for its second season on Wednesday October 9th on the CW. Seems to be the season for a lot of shifting in the entertainment industry and a lot of consolidation and changes and that doesn't exclude comics where Boom Studios and RKA Entertainment have merged.

Boom will be the surviving imprint but most of the RKA catalog items will be back in print now under the Boom label as well which means a lot of good stuff will be available for retailers to carry later in the summer and the end of the year. Meanwhile it's been a pretty successful summer so far for Boom with them placing a graphic novel in the top 10 that being the Adventure Time property and there's also talk of some

expansion in the trading card industry as well. AMC's Mad Men went on with a bang. The finale of the sixth season of the show was the highest rated in their history giving a 2.1 rating and about 2.7 million viewers which is way up for the fifth season finale back in 2012.

Production on the seventh and final season of Mad Men beginning July will premiere on the network in 2014. Our trip to the comic shop this week not too expensive and we come out with a big bag of fun summer time reading. It starts a dark horse and a comic that harkens back to comics greatest world with some of

those characters brought back by Joe Casey in Catalyst Comics number one. Over at DC the Trinity event is about ready to begin and there's a couple of preludes to that this week. In titles like Trinity of Sin Pandora number one and Trinity of Sin The Phantom Stranger number ten.

Couple of fun independent first issues from Image this week Dark Skull Kickers Dark number one and Satellite Sam number one both worth checking out. Marvel's Infinity event begins with Avengers number fifteen and a prelude there this week. Age of Ultron continues in a new Avengers title called Avengers A1 number one and what happened if the Avengers versus X-Men event had ended well differently.

There's a question asked by a point contributor Jimmy Palmieri and it's answered in What If Avengers versus X-Men number one with Jimmy doing his book that features just about every Avenger and X-Men character that Marvel's ever had. And this week Dexter the final season premiered on Showtime and the Dexter comic book finally makes it to Marvel with the first issue this week.

All those items and more waiting for you hopefully at a cool air conditioned comic store near you. Find the latest right now easily of course with the comic book locator service one eight eight eight comic book or with the free app that's available in the iTunes app store or with another website called Find My Comic Shop dot com and do keep in mind over the

July fourth week that comic shops may have different shipping schedules and different hours so double check that as well. There's a wrap for the podcast as you can follow pop culture 24 seven on the point radio we broadcast right from get the point radio dot com 24 seven and you can take us along on your mobile device if you're an Apple user get the free app to the iTunes app store

under pop culture in the point if you have a droid or a blackberry then check out the app called tune in it's free as well. The podcast turns up on websites like ComicMix dot com and Michael Davis world dot com and the iTunes podcast directory as well. You can follow us on social media under the point radio on Facebook and on Twitter and

you gotta have a great 4th of July we demand it okay and we'll see you back here at a few days. Get the point radio dot com.