Moderator Matthias Opdenhövel seems almost inspired when the firefly, who has just been unmasked, looks puzzled at the crowd next to him, the huge head of his purple-gold sparkling costume under his arm. “What an honor!” Calls Opdenhövel with open arms towards the woman who has emerged. “Oh, honey,” she gasps back exhausted and points to her disguised lower body. “It’s an honor to have a tail like that – and wings!”
If this brief description has piqued your curiosity and you now want to know which celebrities turned into oversized fireflies for one evening, then it means that the basic principle of the show still works: the puzzle of which stars were behind the high-quality designs Hide costumes. Also at The Masked Dancer, the offshoot of the Pro-Sieben hit show that started yesterday evening The Masked Singer, as a spectator, you can hardly ignore the need to end up wanting to know who was actually standing on stage for hours at a time. That’s the good news for Pro Sieben.
Enter the sheep.
(Photo: Willi Weber)
The bad news: The Masked Dancer must lose a lot of guessing fun compared to the original format. The show no longer lets its masked stars sing in the new offshoot, but dance. As a result, the audience loses an important clue with the voice, in order to come to the true identities of sheep, monkeys, colored pencil and Co. Instead, the guessing people should recognize the celebrities on the basis of their dance style and individual movements that should be characteristic of the respective stars.
Because the performances, as the only clues for guessing, seemed too tricky even for the producers, the show leaves a back door open, as the celebrities can still be recognized on the basis of their voices: The members of the prominent advice team consisting of singer Alexander Klaws and presenter Steven Gätjen and guest juror Ruth Moschner each receive two jokers at the beginning of the program, which they can place in a total of three places per program. The “voice decoder” enables you to hear the real voice of a dancer for a short moment based on a spoken word.
After her unmasking, Ute Lemper said: “And I wasn’t even allowed to sing.”
However, the Joker didn’t help anyone with the firefly. Neither in the advice team nor on the Internet did anyone bet on singer and musical actress Ute Lemper – a world star. Incidentally, when she was unmasked, she said, “And I wasn’t even allowed to sing for you!”
In order to make guessing even easier, Pro Sieben announced in advance that they would make the individual costumes more body-hugging and the instructional films shown for each mask less cryptic than in the vocal show. at The Masked Dancer However, there is seldom any trace of it: Costumes such as the colorful fringed monster called “Zottel” even give an idea of the gender of the dancer. So if you want to solve the puzzles, guessing becomes mere internet research and the beautifully staged choreographies and elaborate stage designs then take a back seat.
This is particularly a shame, because the extraordinary appearance is an often underestimated reason for the worldwide success of The Masked Singer. Yes, the mask puzzle encourages viewers to switch on every week. Crazy and completely unfamiliar images ensure that undecided TV viewers get stuck on the show with its strange costumes and even stranger appearances while aimlessly zapping through the TV program. Who switches easily when – as in the Austrian version – a steaming yeast dumpling rocks to Rednex ‘”Cotton Eye Joe”? Or what if none other than Kermit the frog crawls out of the American snail costume?
Live moments are pluses of linear entertainment television: You have to be there now
It is moments like these that set linear entertainment television apart from the offering of streaming services. Moments in which millions of viewers witness the same bizarre scenes at the same time. No wonder that TV stations from more than 50 countries have now secured the rights to the originally South Korean song format. The German version emphasizes this live factor much more than most countries. The programs are even recorded in the USA and Great Britain, while in Cologne, the city of private television and carnival, the wild masked party is raging in real time.
Also The Masked Dancer broadcasts its remaining three episodes live, in this respect the offshoot does not differ from the original format. So one cannot assume that Pro Sieben had screwed up their formula for success – the basic riddle of who is behind the masks. Problems tend to be caused by the “new type of guessing”, as station boss Daniel Rosemann called the adjustments that were made for The Masked Dancer had to be taken. Too many and too tricky, as it turns out now. Ultimately, the unmasking can promise such a nice arc of suspense that precedes them – if there are too few people who come along while guessing, the best puzzle will not work.
“The Masked Dancer”, Pro Sieben, Thursdays, 8:15 pm