BY DC CUEVA
Johnny has been an omnipresent staple of most every Challenge season since he debuted on The Duel in 2006 after he first came into our lives when Key West, Florida welcomed The Real World, and a Challenge doesn't really begin until he proposes a toast to begin the proceedings after the challengers move in. And it was four years ago this week that he pulled out the most talked about Challenge moment ever: him stealing all of the money of partner Sarah Rice on Rivals III - which brought him much notoriety ever since... although he didn't have to deal with much hate being spilled his way after conquering the Czech Republic for #7.
But along with being part of Team MTV, in the past two years he has also had a very good side gig of being the host of 1ST LOOK TV, NBC's weekend lifestyle & travel show that enjoys the coveted spot of airing after Saturday Night Live. This has allowed him to get out of his comfort zone of being around The Challenge community 24/7 to log in even more frequent flier miles around the globe to go on unique adventures that allows us to venture along with him like what we see on his Instagram stories whenever he's not competing or training.
In Part 1 of this ExtraTime Special yesterday, we looked at most of Johnny's first season of 1st Look that brought him to Scotland, the Desert, Coney Island and to Alaska to explore what this world really is about when you get to live freely as he does. And now here in Part 2, we join him for even more of these nice adventures, including traveling to the Caribbean for fun in the sun, a venture to one of the world's most guarded borders, and more special guests that you may be familiar with. That includes the precursor to the Total Madness ice-breaker with that gingerman from the Midwest.
🌆 I Love L.A.!
We begin this portion with the region where Bananas calls home - or at least up the I-5 from the OC: Los Angeles has always been described as that city with many cities being rolled into one. And he got to take a trip up in a chopper to see the City of Angels from high above the traffic and down in its highways, turn himself into a Universal Studios tour guide, and check out the L.A. cuisine with Mama Bananas, Laura Avery. And when he ventured into Koreatown, waiting for him were some double trouble from West Hollywood: Tom Sandoval & Tom Schwartz of Vanderpump Rules.
🌳 Minnesota
For those who watched Bananas' first MTV show, the person who became his rival and then teamed to win Rivals I, Tyler Duckworth, is a native Minnesotan. The state is synonymous with winter's cold, but Johnny paid a visit to the Twin Cities in the summertime to sample everything that Minneapolis and St. Paul has to offer from the annual State Fair to boarding a booze cruise to, of course, trying his hand at being a lumberjack.
🎽 Competitor
Johnny is, of course, a competitor through and through after seeing him on The Challenge so many times. And here, he put his skills to work in going up against Bellator MMA's Michael "Venom" Page inside the cage in London, and taking on Drone Racing League champion Nurk in the emerging sport.
📓 School & Questions
Not an actual episode of sorts, but as his second season of hosting began, Johnny shared with everyone what it was like going to school, including who he wanted to be growing up and having a sister also going to school with him too down in Orange County. And he also got to answer questions of "Would You Rather" 50 times.
🇧🇶 Curacao
For his first adventure of his second season in the 1st Look driver's seat, Johnny flew down to the Caribbean and the small island of Curacao, with a population of just under 160,000 (just shy of the largest city in the Inland Empire, Ontario, CA), but which boasts beautiful beaches, a vibrant architecture and liqueurs aplenty. The locals gave him a tour of everything they offer on the beach, beneath the water and the culture of this paradise.
🤑 More Job Searching...
Part 1 of Bananas' Many Sides included an episode where he curated food made out of pot, paired up worthy singles and became a zookeeper in Miami. For getting another shot at trying out to fill up his growing resume on non-television related occupations saw him become a gunslinger in the Wild Wild West, becoming a bodyguard for a Texas area security firm, a taking on the opponents of the sea in shark-infested waters of an Arizona aquarium, and going to Kansas to judge... certain odors(?!).
🇰🇷 The Korean DMZ
For the most recent Olympics two years ago, Pyeongchang, South Korea welcomed the world for the 2018 Winter Games, where it is situated 60 miles away from the border of North Korea. Johnny paid a visit to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where he got to explore the world's most heavily-guarded area to see what it is like at the gates of one of the world's last remaining communist nations, then went whitewater rafting, fishing, sampling Korean cuisine and visiting a local pottery museum.
🎸 Austin, TX
Closer to home, Bananas went to the live music capital of the world, Austin, TX, where waiting for him was new ATX resident Mike "The Miz" Mizanin at a local farm sanctuary to see plenty of animals, then went to downtown to tap into the food and culture of the town baby Tadison and three AYTO originals call home. And after dark, Johnny got to take the stage with comedy rap collective Vanilla Pressley to take part in, what else?, a rap battle.
😱 Fears
With every task of doing TV shows like these, Johnny also has to man up on occasion and face whatever fear that might come to his table. And with the help of one Dr. Drew, he eventually had to confront a few phobias of his including the one that most of us dread the most of facing some spiders, along with spending a day behind bars in getting apprehended. Plus, the Banana Man also had to face the reality of working an actual 9-5 job in a cubicle, and even losing a challenge for a change.
🐐 Friends
When he signed up to do 1st Look, we pretty much knew that there would be plenty of special guests from Team MTV also taking their talents to the Peacock for one night only. Bananas got to ask now 2-time finalist Kyle Christie to practice good manners in the comforts of a London gentlemen's club, then past host Ashley Roberts engaged him in a challenge of doing cha-cha dancing. And Johnny stopped by Barstool Sports' Chicks in The Office to join hosts Maria Ciuffo & Francesca Mariano for a ride in a subway car, solving puzzles and testing friendships.
👨👨👦 Family Eateries
At heart, Johnny is a family guy who still has time whenever he's not circling the globe and being out and about to spend quality time with those who have seen his growth from when he entered this globe thirty-eight years ago. He got to spend some time making food at family-owned restaurants at the most simplest of small businesses: operations locally owned and operated in the community.
🎬 Acting
As he lives out there in the heart of the entertainment world - and who even gave both Entourage and Adult Swim a run for their money, there's always the option out there that if he wanted to take a break from doing Challenges he can play someone else on camera. In an episode that saw him try out the various options out there of doing acting, Johnny got to try out acting classes, doing voiceover work for cartoons years after Exes 2 was parodied on Robot Chicken, and serving as a puppet master.
📟 Nineties
If an MTV show of a few years ago is proof, for a lot of us what we got to experience in the 2000's & the 2010's doesn't compare to what life was like growing up in the 90's. Johnny got a chance to visit Slobby Robby of Netflix fame to check out gems of that rad decade and getting a makeover to when he was that teenager in high school back then. He also got to head to a local toy store before arriving at a hospital to witness the birth of his very own Cabbage Patch Kid and encounter an early test of what it would be like to be a dad. And he also met up with 90's House co-host Lance Bass' fellow member of 'NSYNC (and one that this blogger met ten years ago in Vegas), Joey Fatone.
👨🦰 The Showdown
But for the single most memorable moment of Johnny's two seasons as the host of 1st Look, it took for a trip to the last remaining survivor of the '90s craze of tabloid talk shows, Maury Povich, to bring together Bananas with longtime Challenge nemesis Wes Bergmann for, along with those paternity tests, his most patented production technique of putting the two under a lie detector. This, along with them sharing the red carpet at last year's MTV Movie & TV Awards, helped to set the table for the unlikeliest of all Holy Alliances that was formed when they entered the Total Madness bunker, and led to their elimination showdown that paved the way for his ascent into 7th Heaven.
He added, "If Johnny Bananas on The Challenge has been an ice cream sundae with no toppings, 1st Look is going to be chocolate sauce, chopped nuts and a cherry on top. Instead of just a banana, you're going to get a banana split." And he has relished that role ever since in the same show another MTV alum, The Hills' Audrina Patridge, helmed at about 1AM in the morning after ninty-minutes of live sketch comedy from the Big Apple.
The fact that this airs on the kind of TV your parents and elders grew up on over that rabbit ears antenna has helped to make Johnny so much more well-known beyond the cable world in taking his fans, those staying up after SNL and everyone else along for the ride each week. Obviously, the trick he pulled four years ago had something to do with that, plus there's also growing acceptance of The Challenge in the broader reality community as it has gotten to welcome more people outside the MTV world into competing alongside him.
What can we expect when his third season of 1st Look TV, Bananas Style comes around? If you've seen his Instagram, he's already hard at work at that while popping the bottles again after his seventh Challenge triumph, albeit in our new world. And if what we've seen in the first two seasons have been something, we can only imagine the coming season will be just as good. Just wait on it...
🍌 🍌 🍌
Stories like the one you've just read is offered from the unique vantage point of ExtraTime - DCBLOG's way of focusing on the world of MTV Reality and those who are part of its legacy though original storytelling offering a different look at the people, the moments, the shows and the world of TV's most fascinating reality programming. It's only a part of our look Inside MTV Reality, which also includes weekly episode coverage, social reaction and more in covering everything from The Challenge to Siesta Key and everything else in between.
If you like you've seen, bookmark us and like, comment & share our posts on the social media platforms of your choice, subscribe to this site's email lists and notifications on your favorite social apps whenever we post new content, and include the hashtags #DCBLOG & #SeeForYourself in your posts to @DC408Dxtr, and tell a friend about us so that they and your fellow MTV Reality fans can be introduced to the outstanding content we offer... and thank you for reading.
- I AM DC
#DCBLOG
No comments:
Post a Comment
Got something on your mind? Let us know! But please be mindful and do not post spam or negative comments (due to that, all comments are subject to blogger approval... and we reserve the right to disable these sections if things get way out of hand).