While the six remaining Amazing Race families
finally left American soil and excitedly jetted off to Panama (and I use the frantically italicized
"finally" for the benefit of all those media snobs who recoil at kids, God forbid, running around loose this season; or, eeew!, historical Americana being foisted upon our uber-exotic
The Amazing Race.
The HORROR!), a lot of what we thought was lost forever on this Family Edition excursion came roaring back into plain view. And for all my media snob pals reading this bromide, I will admit that cute little Carissa Gaghan locked onto the camera lens and said, "I'm excited FINALLY that we're getting out of the U.S." Well, so, there you go...
By David W. Taylor (
Email Me)
Reality Reel Media
10.28.05
Featuring Jonathan Baker from The Amazing Race 6
www.jonathanbakerandvictoriafuller.com
Yes, there it was,
finally... like 'ol uncle Harry stumbling-in after a bender... the Fast Forward. Though, strangely, as Phil stated, the only one of the whole bloody season. Huh? And even more irksome — no,
tragic — was that unlike the uproarious Fast Forwards of say, Season Three, where Terri & Ian slugged through a rug merchant's prodigious inventory in Marrakech in a wrenching, toe-to-toe, rug-flinging battle — with John Vito & Jill — for a Fast Forward Clue woven into the back of a single throw rug (among literally hundreds); or, if possibly even more excruciating, in the indelible Season One, a heart-palpitating Fast Forward at the Reclining Buddha, in Thailand, where Team Guido and Nancy & Emily paced up-and-down repeatedly, like lunatics, trying to outrace the other in tossing exactly 108 coins into 108 urns... well, this was intense, nail-biting stuff. Each off-course struggle a complete Race onto itself. And when one was awarded a Fast Forward at the end of this kind of throbbing competition, one damn well tootin' earned it.
Nowadays you just show up first and you get it, essentially. The big 'showing up' is the reward. In Season Seven, Ray & Deana arrived first at a Fast Forward in Africa and proceeded to walk across a high-wire walkway slung atop the bottomless pit of what looked like an abandoned nuclear plant cooling tower. A few minutes later Rob & Amber showed up and were forced to hang-tight and gawk upward while either Ray ("Suck it up!") or Deana finished the task or flubbed it. I can also well remember my bubbling angst during Season Six, when Jonathan and Victoria had to curb themselves impatiently at the edge of a harbor dock in Corsica, awaiting entry into that nautically-tinged Fast Forward. This while "Hell Boy" Adam (of Adam & Rebecca) farted-around underwater, grappling with his bulky deep sea diving gear and his awakening claustrophobia. It was like Adam & Rebecca were being rewarded for being awkward and for dawdling. Instead of a Fast Forward Race, we simply gaped at a knucklehead walking on the ocean floor, like Captain Nemo. The trailing team should have been given the chance to pass him, to initiate a race. In a peculiar regression, all the Fast Forward rivalry has been banished from this once thrilling Amazing Race sideshow.
