When I was a kid in America I used to watch a TV show called “Candid Camera“.
This show put ordinary people in awkward or funny situations and filmed the results with a hidden camera.
After the victim’s humorous reaction, the host would reveal the prank with the show’s tagline “Smile, you’re on candid camera”.
Japan has a similar program that I enjoyed watching that was titled 「パニックフェイス」 (“Panic Face), but has been renamed 「パワフルフェイス」 (“Powerful Face“).
Americans like TV variety shows and game shows that have ordinary people as contestants or guests but in Japan, having established celebrities on the shows is more popular.
So, “Panic Face” (“Powerful Face”) has a celebrity (usually a comedian) as an unsuspecting victim and the point of the show is to see the victim’s “Panic Face”…or shocked expression.
Here are a few funny episodes that I watched on TV when they originally aired here in Japan…
This one has a celebrity in his dressing room preparing for his appearance on TV…when “ghosts” appear in his mirror and room:
This next on has two “magicians” mimicking two actual famous Japanese magicians who appear in the dressing room of a comedian and demonstrate a few of their “tricks”:
And this one has a “police officer” doing a “Jack Bauer” and commandeers the private cars (bicycle) of three comedians:
Tokyo Five 
I saw the “Ghost Mirror” video on an American TV show called Tosh.0. I couldn’t stop laughing!
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I’ve never heard of “Tosh.0“.
Do they show many Japanese shows on that program?
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They don’t. It’s mostly a show based on presenting online videos and then a stand-up comedian makes jokes about the videos. It focuses on shock humor more than I’d like, but I still find it humorous.
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Like a “best of YouTube” TV show?
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That one with the ghosts would have freaked me out especially when they came out of the walls! I enjoyed the trick mirror ones too. There was a show a few years ago with
aston Kucher (don’t know how to spell his name) called punked, they would pull off elaborate pranks on different celebrities, then at the end he would appear and they knew they had been “punked”. It was fairly entertaining for a while but it gets old.
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“Punk’d” aired on TV here a few years ago for a season or two.
>It was fairly entertaining for a while but it gets old.
I watched a few episodes. I felt the same way—funny the first few times, but quickly redundant.
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24 with japanese dub sounds interesting 😉
Was it popular in Japan? I used to love it, sadly it seems that there won’t be any new seasons 😦
we have some candid camera-like show in Germany as well. the most famous show is called “verstehen sie spaß” (something like “can you take a joke” in english). they have celebrities and “normal” people as candidates… anyway, not really my type of show 🙂
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>Was it popular in Japan?
It was shown on cable TV here. I don’t have cable TV so I don’t see many foreign (non-Japanese) TV shows.
But after cable TV finishes airing a show, it becomes available for rental at DVD shops.
That’s how I saw “24” (and also “Prison Break“).
But, anyways, the American TV series “24” was slightly popular here in Japan.
>(German “Candid Camera” is) not really my type of show
What types of TV shows do you enjoy?
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I don’t really like those entertainment TV shows with celebrities. I don’t know how it is in the USA or Japan, but in Germany they do gossip an awful lot during those shows, and I just can’t stand that 😉
There are some comedy shows with stand-up comedians I enjoy watching, and sometimes a documentary doesn’t hurt either 😉
Sadly all the music channels have either crappy music or ring tone commercials all the time.
I have a passion for drama TV shows like “Lost”, “24”, “House MD”, “Breaking Bad” and so on… Most of them are from the USA, and since I don’t like dubbed TV shows I either buy the DVDs or watch them online in their original language.
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>I have a passion for drama TV shows like “Lost”, “24″, “House MD”, “Breaking Bad” and so on…
I’m American, but the only show of those that I’ve heard of is “24“.
I guess you know about American TV better than me now.
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I guess that can’t be helped when you live in Japan 😉 I bet living in Europe feels closer to America than living in Japan. And even if you consider that; I’m really a total TV show freak 😛
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> I bet living in Europe feels closer to America than living in Japan.
Yeah, I’m sure that Europe is culturally closer to America than Japan is.
>I’m really a total TV show freak
I love TV too. But I don’t subscribe to cable so I see almost exclusively Japanese television shows.
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Pretty scary! I can relate to the one of the boy running away from the mirror-that would definitely be my reaction. I remember “Candid Camera”-they were very funny! I haven’t watched any shows like these for a long time, maybe since all you kids lived at home….Mom
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Yeah, I don’t believe in ghosts but that would definitely be a startling prank!
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