Manaba (TV series)

Manaba (マナバ) is a Yamataian motoring television program which premiered on 1 April 2002. The program focuses on the examination and reviewing of motor vehicles, primarily cars, though this has expanded greatly over the years to incorporate motoring-based challenges, special races, radical vehicular modifications, timed laps of notable cars, celebrity appearances, and more. The program has drawn acclaim for its visual and presentation style, which is focused on being entertaining to the viewers. The distinctive presentation with the three hosts, who often interact in an irreverent and almost entirely unscripted manner, was a major departure from earlier motoring shows and has spawned a great deal of competitors and imitators. Since its launch, the program has been aired on YaHoKyo General.

The program's first series in 2002 was presented by Tsuchiya Keitaro, acclaimed touge racer, veteran YaHoKyo presenter Yamagata Yoshiro, and former newscaster Kido Hiroyuki. In 2003, Kido was replaced by Masaki Tsutomu, with this lineup remaining unchanged to the present day. The name of the program, Manaba (満なば) is Yamataian slang for a full fuel tank, from a shortening of 満油箱 (man abura-bako).

Manaba has been one of YaHoKyo's most popular and commercially successful programs. The show has also drawn controversy due to various remarks and actions made by the presenters.

Celebrity Ride-Along
Another major segment in the program, celebrities are invited to take a ride in a car driven by a professional race driver wearing a facemask or other disguise, who either unexpectedly enters a speedway and drives at a high speed or goes for a harrowing Touge Run on the mountain roads. The celebrities' reactions are caught on hidden cameras within the cars. The driver would then reveal themselves at the end of the drive as a famous Yamataian motorsport champion. Finally, the celebrities would be driven to the studio where the presenters and the studio audience would review the hidden camera footage.

In the earlier seasons, the celebrities were not informed that they would be on Manaba until just before the driver begins the high-speed portion, enabling genuine reactions from the celebrities. The popularity of Manaba and some complaints meant that in later seasons most celebrities were already aware of what was coming, so the main draw of the segment became the identity of the drivers, who began wearing fully-enclosed racing helmets.

For an episode in 2015, the roles were reversed when five-time touge champion Yonamine Seiji was the passenger, and was brought for a thoroughly boring drive through the Asakura Mountain Track. In the end, the driver was revealed to be Tsuchiya Keitaro himself, who Yonamine was a major fan of.

Challenges
As part of Manaba's format, every episode has contained at least a number of segments involving challenges. In the first few series, these were focused on novelty challenges and stunts that were typically based on absurd premises. However, these later changed into situations in which the presenters were either competing against each other with a car they chose in a series of tests, having to modify a car to fulfill certain criteria, or working together to accomplish a goal.

Versus Battle
A staple of the series, the versus battle is in virtually every episode of Manaba, and involves two vehicles going head-to-head to complete three battles. The first two are typically orthodox and are usually speed or agility-based, but the third battle is often a bizarre scenario such as carrying a pyramid of eggs safely on a lap of the track or jumping over other vehicles. Sometimes, the vehicles matched up for the battles are also widely different or absurd choices, such as putting a dirt bike against a city bus (as both were manufactured by Kawazaki) or staging a battle between two fighter planes - with the planes remaining on the ground and judged according to motor vehicle standards.

Grand Race
In at least one episode per season, the presenters carry out a point-to-point race across Yamatai or a foreign country with at least one presenter in a motor vehicle and the others in different types of transportation. As part of the show's humour, the presenters are allegedly allowed to disregard all laws but immediately lose the race (and their jobs) if they are caught by the authorities. This has resulted in humorous situations like Tsuchiya riding a motorcycle into a train to avoid downtown Niihama traffic, Yamagata accidentally driving through an Imperial Army live-fire exercise as part of a shortcut, Masaki stealing an identical car from a dealership in Wanshu after his broke down, and numerous (staged) police chases.