MovieChat Forums > The Running Man (1987) Discussion > How do normal episodes work?

How do normal episodes work?

posted 11 years ago by DJ-Ren
11 replies | jump to latest

OK, if I remember correctly, each episode of The Running Man was supposed to be 3 hours long. So let's say they putz around for 1 hour before sending in that episode's "bad guy", followed shortly by a Stalker coming in. Now, no Stalker has ever been killed before, right? So either the bad guy's a wimp, and the Stalker can chase him around for awhile... or the bad guy's a bad ass and the Stalker has to kill the bad guy to defend himself. Either way, how can they POSSIBLY get 3 hours of "usable air time" for each episode? The one with Arnie only lasted as long as it did because a) they kept sending down more bad guys; b) they kept sending down stalkers until they ALL got killed, and then they had to bring "Captain America" (or whatever his name was) out of retirement. And *THAT* episode lasted 3 hours.

And not only would there be the problem of filling the 3 hours each episode, but how long would the public's interest last if it was one Stalker chasing & killing one bad guy each episode, combined with, like, 2:35hrs of B.S.??

I dunno - am I just missing something here? All (nicely phrased) retorts, counter-arguments, other ideas of how a "regular episode" would go... whatever. I'd love to hear them all.

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[–] everydayboredom1980 11 years ago

I was watching the movie the other day and thought of that. How they were all mourning Sub-Zero at first when he died, and they were all shocked.

Maybe the contestants often are able to run and escape against certain stalkers, but get killed by later ones.

[–] Kruleworld 11 years ago

Maybe the contestants often are able to run and escape against certain stalkers

The contestant only had to escape all four zones to 'win'. They were'nt supposed to kill the stalkers. (although we find out that the 'winners' were killed after the fact and they lie about it.)

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[–] Littlebitsofgaming 11 years ago

They probably kept adding more "contestants" to the game zone.

That is the way I always saw it too.
I mean, let's just say in the episode shown in this film (for arguments sake) Arnie gets killed.
They would just throw in another "contestant" to pad out the air time.

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[–] 11 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Strazdamonas 11 years ago

Who says there has to only be one contestant per show?

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[–] Shiddy 11 years ago

don't forget about the numerous commercials.. the actual show is probably only about 30 minutes worth haha

[–] Cassandra_Speaker 11 years ago

What I'm wondering is how often the show was aired. Was it a weekly one, or a monthly show or whatever? Cause it looks like they need a lot of time to set each show up for it to be a normal weekly program.

And I'm not sure that Arnold killed all the Stalkers, we saw lots of guys in the Locker room. The ones sent were just the "Elite" ones and after he killed Buzzsaw (since Buzzsaw was some Champion stalker himself) Killian figured only high-class Stalkers would last against Richards.

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6IwVKuAoQ

[–] ryker84 10 years ago

I assume that they always send more than one runner in, just like they did with Ben Richards and his two friends.

A stalker then would go in, "play" with the victims for a while (like Sub Zero did) and eventually kill one of them. Then with some show narrative the runners would be allowed to "accomplish" the zone (by letting them escape) and enter the next, where another stalker comes in and so on.

I guess you could easily fill 3 hours by slowly decimating the group of candidates (not to mention all the talk in-between and of course the commercials), and build a lot of tension for the audience.

[–] weaselnutz 10 years ago

I always figured that they had multiple runners they could send in if needed. Plus with all the dancing routines, Captain America's color commentary, and Killians interactions with the audience members, not to mention commercials I could easily see them filling a 3 hour slot.

I'm sure they also have a panel of experts and retired stalkers to do commentary like on Monday night football. This wasn't shown in the movie because we only witnessed the live taping. It's like being at a live football game you never get to see terry bradshaw and the boys kidding around back in the studio when you are at the game, those elements are edited in only for the home audience.

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[–] stevenackerman69 10 years ago

Well, there was also an intermission, right? Let's say that's 15 minutes, plus commercial breaks. Also, maybe there were several contestants each episode. Finally, the guy's name was Capt. Freedom, but he didn't actually play-they used trick photography to make it look like he was fighting Richards and killing him.

[–] DJ-Ren 10 years ago

To me a lot of what people wrote in made sense. Like, they knew Arnie was an extraordinary bad azz, that's why they injected him and gassed him. (They asked Steven King once, "What was your least favourite film adaptation of your work?" And every other time I'd heard or read him asked that, he said, "[Kubrick's] The Shining". But one time it was "The Running Man - because it was NOTHING like my story"! I'm falling asleep here, so I'm just gonna say that the previous post made me think of when that "Millionaire" show (hosted by Regis Philbin") was soooo popular that every network put out a game show, and Fox put out that game show that claimed to be the biggest ever - you could theoretically keep playing forever and, as long as you never phucced up, you could win a BILLION dollars. Well, like the last poster said, they could have kept showing previous footage. That's how the Fox show - I think it was called "GR$ED" - made for DAMN sure no one was going near that $1,000,000,000! They'd show, like, 15 minutes from the last show, have a commercial, come back, "and just in case you missed it", show the same damn 15 minutes, and so on. Then, when people got sick of that, they'd start asking questions that nobody could POSSIBLY know the answer to. Like, "In 1986, Jello did a survey of all 93 of their flavours. Which order did these 9 flavours come in?" And it wasn't something you could read in a book; even if you were a Jello fiend, it wasn't like "Pick the top 9 flavours in 1986"; no, it was like one was 3rd, one was was 16th, and so on. Fox WAYYYYY over covered their azz!

Oh Flaco, you done phucced up now, ese!

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