came across this bit o' info....
from a site with a dubious name....but anyway, the site had this info:
"Ok. Since I'm met Dave a few times and from what I have read about the guy in the late-great Tokyo Journal interview of him (circa 1989?) which is no longer online...
From my fading jiji memory, Dave came to Japan in 1981 on the JAW-TETSB Program (Just Another Wannabe --Teaching English to Scrape By)---which is to say he islike me and a lot of other FG here. He had some production experience and hell of a lot of ZUZUSHI---brazen chutzpa. Paraphrasing from memory what he described as his big start in Japanese TV in his Tokyo Journal interview:
"After working a couple of years a production go-for in Japanese---I just knew seeing those gaijin tarento monkeys on TV, I just puke. So I broke onto a TV set filming a talento monkey show and challenged them in my loudest fastest Japanese, 'I can do better'. And those bozos. hired me. I been working every since."
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DAVID SPECTOR -- the unapproved BIO
Born: Chicago Northside, circa 1959ish
Appearance: 5ft 5in, 140 lbs soaking wet*,
blond-dyed BIG hair held firm with hard jell snot [it's as real as blond hair can be on a Jewish guy], blue contact lens in his brown eyes, always shoulder pads in his undershirt, bad teeth, left handed, and a BIG mouth.
See Dave and his sister Penny on his left noting her hair color.
Present home: In a Japanese TV interview two years ago, Dave showed that he lives in a trashed room in the Shinjuku Keiyo Plaza. He said has, "only lived in hotels for the past 20 years."
School: BA in LA, Hard Knocks Unv.;
PhD, Newport Asia Pacific University, Dr. Dave Spector
Television Celebrity & Journalist
Work: College/public access TV, he "claims" to have worked at Second City and National Lampoon (my friends at both places say, 'no f*king way').
Co-writer" for Airport '77 (1977) and co-author of the paperback AIRPORT '77. Pan, 1977, ("Now a major motion picture from Universal").
In a TV interview, Quote:
Dave Spector, who had landed in Japan as a segment producer for "Ripley's Believe it or Not".
The thing that Japanese have on their minds about Americans is that they're blond and blue-eyed and they're wearing sweatshirts and stuff like that. But of course, I'm not like that at all. I'm from Chicago originally and I decided to look more 'American'. I would change my hair a little bit, you know? And it looks very strange, you know, I feel weird when I go back to Los Angeles. People think I'm in a heavy metal group or something like that, and I also have like, you know, the blue contacts. And all of a sudden, 'Wow! Look how American he looks. We can use him much better now.'
BEST OF THE WORST Fox TV, 1991-92
GHOST SOUP(Japanese TV Drama, 1992) Cast: Ran Ran Suzuki, Dave Spector.
The Iwai version of "Christmas Miracle" -- a comical look at the strange events of one Christmas eve.
'Spector 21', 2000, See Spector do the Space Crab bikini dance photo Quote:
directed by Hideyuki Tanaka (starring: Dave Spector, Pierre Taki, Senri Yamazaki, Prof. Otsuki, Kiyoshi Beat, Shie Kohinata and others)
The future TV shopping program entitled 'Spector 21' has the lowest audience rating because it deals in worthless items like Space kitchen knife, Space crab and Space scourer. The MC Dave Spector's jokes are really boring and both the producer and director are worried about how to raise the audience rating.
Iron Chef--US version, 2001, Japanese color commentator, Dave Spector
Present gig: Spector is listed as a stringer for ABC TV on his regular appearance on the "Sunday Japon" TBS 10:0Oam (ch6)
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*Dave does not look like this Dave Spector or this guy that offers, " My resume photo. I look like Dave Spector, an American who lives in Japan."
More Spector interview quotes from an educational video called "The Japanese Version", :
Quote:
"Gaijin Tarentos
As embodied by Kent Gilbert and Dave Spector, both profiled in "The Japanese Version", the concept of the gaijin tarento, or "foreign talent", has no real equivalent in the United States. These are men, American-born, whose fluency in Japanese and ability to fit themselves into a perceived stereotype of American behavior have yielded them lucrative TV careers in Japan as professional Americans. Gilbert, the clean-cut Utah man, and Spector, the artificially blonde energetic urbanite, are often presented as "typical Americans", and their opinions sought on a variety of subjects that they do not necessarily have any expertise in. There are two or three more gaijin tarento on TV, including a Sri Lankan and an American bodybuilder, and their friendly demeanor helps soften the edges of what many Japanese think is an aggressive American culture. They are domesticated, tamed "pandas", reassuring to the home viewer. Perhaps this is an essential process in a culture which is essentially non-confrontational.
Quote:
[Dave Spector: Making foreigners cuter takes away the threat of foreigners being more powerful, or having more know-how, or more sophistication. So definitely, they use that in a way to make themselves more comfortable. So I've done things on Japanese TV that are totally silly, or ridiculous. I mean like jumping rope with French poodles. Doing things like the lowest Bozo, circus kind of stuff. But it doesn't bother me at all. A lot of times the foreigners on TV, models and what-not, are compared to pandas. They use that term here--pandas-- because they're cuddly, you can go and have fun with them, and throw a marshmallow and that's about it. And you don't get involved any more deeper than that. But...since I'm making half a million dollars a year, I'm very happy to be a panda. I'd be a much lower animal. I'd be like a sloth, or something, or a hedgehog, you know, for that money. So it doesn't bother me at all.
[Narrator]: It was one thing to cut the foreigner down to acceptable size on TV. But the Japanese know that America is not a nation filled with pandas.
