'Iron Chef' a heaping helping of cheesy fun

If that phrase -- which I've been told is not actually proper French -- means anything to you, then you're obviously a fan of "Iron Chef" or its American spinoffs.

"Iron Chef," for the uninitiated, is a cooking competition in which two chefs try to prepare the best dishes based on a surprise ingredient announced at the start of the show. Although the competition itself is real, there's a fictional framework in which the battles are supposedly being carried out for the amusement of an eccentric and wealthy character known as "The Chairman." The Chairman, according to this premise, has chosen several top chefs and given them the title of "Iron Chef." Each week, a challenger comes to Kitchen Stadium, a large and well-equipped dual kitchen, to face off against one of the Iron Chefs. The secret ingredient is announced, the Chairman exclaims "Allez cuisine!" ("Begin cooking!") and then the chefs have an hour to cook. At the end of the cooking, the dishes are presented to a judging panel, and a winner is declared. There is no prize at stake except honor. (The opening narration to the English-dubbed Japanese version says that someone who beats an Iron Chef will win "the people's ovation, and fame forever.")

The show has a tongue-in-cheek atmosphere somewhere between professional wrestling and those badly-dubbed martial arts movies from the 1970s.

Play-by-play

The original Japanese "Iron Chef" became a surprise hit when Food Network began airing English-dubbed episodes in the late 1990s. Fuji TV, the Japanese network which produced the original series, was responsible for the dubbing, and I think the voiceovers played a big part of the show's American success. Bill Bickard, an American who moved to Japan to play baseball, was hired to dub the show's announcer, Kenji Fukui. Bickard gave the show the cadence and tone of an American sportscast while still hinting at the Japanese culture which shaped the source material.

That mix between the familiar and the exotic was part of what made the show fun to watch. There were ingredients which the Japanese hosts and guests treated as commonplace but which were quite unknown to American viewers like me, and so the show was a culinary education of sorts.

Someone at Fuji also made another brilliant dubbing decision -- they decided, whenever possible, not to dub The Chairman, who was played by a Japanese stage actor named Takeshi Kaga. Kaga has a rich, resonant voice, and subtitling him while everyone else was dubbed into English gave his character a mystique.

Even as the show was becoming a hit on Food Network, it had run its course in Japan and soon stopped production. Once the flow of new episodes ended, Food Network picked through older episodes and re-ran the newer ones ad infinitum. But eventually there were no more in the can.

Fuji TV sold the rights to produce an American version of the show. Food Network was outbid by what was then the UPN network, which produced two pilot episodes for "Iron Chef USA." The UPN version ignored the existence of the Japanese original, but in doing so it failed to give its version any back story, and so the spectacle of William Shatner as the Chairman just seemed strange. The American play-by-play announcers were the bland Michael Berger, Anthony Dias Blue and Sissy Biggers. The pilot episodes were aired as specials, but they got terrible ratings and UPN never turned the show into a series.

Getting it right

The second time around, Food Network got the rights to produce a U.S. version, which it calls "Iron Chef America." Food Network cleverly introduced its version as a spinoff of the Japanese original, presenting its chairman (martial artist and actor Mark Dascassos) as the nephew of Takeshi Kaga's character. (For the record, he's not.) The Food Network version started with a miniseries which brought several of the Japanese Iron Chefs over to battle their American counterparts, and one of them (Masaharu Morimoto) became a regular on the American version once it became a regular series.

The original Food Network miniseries presented Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Wolfgang Puck as Iron Chefs, (Flay had been a challenger twice on the Japanese version.) Puck decided against appearing in the regular series, which started with Flay, Batali and Morimoto, who were soon joined by Cat Cora, the first female Iron Chef. Later, the network added another Iron Chef by means of a "Top Chef"-style reality show, "The Next Iron Chef," which was won by Michael Symon.

I've already expressed my admiration for Alton Brown in these pages, and Brown serves as the play-by-play announcer for "Iron Chef America," adding his own humor and expertise to the proceedings. Kevin Brauch, the floor reporter, complements Brown perfectly.

Another highlight of the American version is the appearance, on many episodes, of Jeffrey Steingarten on the judging panel. Steingarten has the brutal honesty of Simon Cowell on "American Idol," but doesn't seem as egotistical. The show is always more fun when Steingarten is one of the judges.

New episodes of "Iron Chef America" air first on Sunday nights at 8 p.m., with repeats throughout the week.

Even better, Food Network's sister channel Fine Living has begun re-running the Japanese original every night at 10 p.m. Much of the music soundtrack from the original Food Network airings had to be replaced due to rights issues, and it's strange what a difference the new music makes in some of the show's dramatic moments, and in some cases replacing the soundtrack meant that Chairman Kaga had to be dubbed instead of subtitled. Even with new music and a dubbed chairman, it's fun to revisit the Japanese version.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.