My Hot Ones Interview

There's a Youtube show called Hot Ones, where people are interviewed while eating successively spicier hot wings. I think the point of it is that people are more likely to be transparent with their answers if they can't think clearly due to escalating pain. You know, like torture.

The interviewer, Sean Evans, is pretty cool though and doesn't tend to take advantage of his guests while they're under the influence of spice. I've watched a good number of episodes. I definitely don't watch every one, but if the guest is someone I know and find interesting, I'll watch it.

For Christmas, Lee-Anne's mom bought me the 2021 lineup of hot sauces they use on their wings, and yesterday I got Lee-Anne to interview me. We taped it, but I'm debating whether I want to post it or not. It's an hour long, as opposed to the 30 minutes they usually have on the Youtube series. Of course, they have the benefit of being able to edit their footage, which would cut down their time considerably. We also don't have theme music, multiple camera angles, or echoing effects whenever I reacted to spice.

Part of me wants to transcribe the answers into text on here, but I feel like that's missing a big part of the point of the show, which is to watch people react to the heat.

It was still fun to do. Usually Sean Evans eats the wings along with the guest, but we didn't have Lee-Anne do that, since her spice tolerance isn't at that level.

There are ten sauces. I couldn't detect any heat on the first two. It was noticeable on the third. The fourth and fifth had a really nice heat-flavour ratio and were by far my favourite. The fourth was Los Calientes, it was 36,000 Scoville heat units and had kind of a chili taste. Not so much like chili peppers, but more like the dish. It's description says that it has tomatillo, serrano, and apricot. The ingredients list has cumin, which is where I'm probably finding the chili connection. The fifth was Hot Heads Official: Revolutionary. It has 57,000 Scoville heat units and featured scorpion peppers. Scorpion peppers are a superhot, which is a title given to any pepper hotter than a habanero. It's a former Guiness Book of World Records title holder for hottest pepper in the world, dethroning the ghost pepper, but eventually losing to the Carolina reaper. 

I have a bottle of scorpion pepper puree, and it may sound insane, but I actually enjoy the taste of them. When you get to the level of superhot, you come to think of them as simply vehicles to deliver pain, but the scorpion pepper is the one superhot I would argue has a good flavour to it that shines through the heat. In Hot Heads Official: Revolutionary, they manage to capture the deliciousness of the pepper while dialing down the spice to something that is present but doesn't feel too distracting.

Da Bomb: Beyond Insanity, which is their eighth sauce, usually gets the strongest reactions out of guests, so I was eager to try it. With 135,600 heat units, I'd heard that, while it isn't as high on the Scoville scale as the two ahead of it, it's the most unpleasant to take in. There are different types of heat. Some hit you immediately, and some build and burn slowly. Some effect you more on the lips, some hit you more in the digestive track. So while a lot of these sauces have a slow build up that allows you to take in the flavour before experiencing the pain, my impression was that Da Bomb hits you in the face immediately, then in the gut, and it has no redeeming qualities in terms of flavour either. While the other two sauces might be more painful at their peak, they don't hit as fast or as long, and they don't taste as bad.

I had lower expectations for the version of Da Bomb that I received in my collection, though. This is because the one they use on the show has something called pepper extract. I might botch this explanation, but my understanding is that this means they do something to remove the capsaicin, which is what makes peppers spicy, from the pepper itself and use it in the sauce instead of using the whole thing. This system creates certain health implications in the final product, which has led Hot Ones to remove all sauces with pepper extract from their lineup with one exception, that being Da Bomb.

But the Hot Ones' partner company Heatonist, which produces the sauces, didn't want to put a potentially unhealthy sauce to market, so they developed a version of Da Bomb using all natural ingredients, mimicking the flavour of pepper extract without using it. I thought it might be impossible to replicate that experience, and I was right. Da Bomb in my collection had a slow burn heat, and its flavour was unremarkable but not bad.

The hottest sauce was their final in the lineup, The Last Dab with two million Scoville heat units, which is rumoured to not be that hot in practice, since guests seem to be in their worst shape after Da Bomb, but recover a bit by the last wing. The tradition is to dab a little extra on the last one to finish things off. A little redundant for me because I'd just been dabbing sauces on the wings anyway, since I wasn't going to dirty ten dishes by tossing each individual wing in sauce beforehand. This is a legal move though, because when they were doing the Hot Ones At Home during COVID restrictions, guests would just dab on the wings, and Sean said they would usually add more than usual by accident anyway.

Because I was still in good shape by the last wing, I drenched it in sauce until it was coated and dripping, and then slurped up every bit of it for one last chance to have my answers be impacted by heat. It was hot, but I still had presence of mind. It was where I thought I'd be at the seventh wing, which was the Bhutila Fire. I don't even know if the last sauce was that hot because it's the most potent, or because I just took in more of it.

All in all, the experience was a little disillusioning and underwhelming. There wasn't a sauce I couldn't do multiple dabs with. I'll never be able to look at those celebrities with respect again as they contort in pain. After the interview, Lee-Anne tried Los Callientes,  because it was my favourite, and said it was about the limit of her heat tolerance, and she tried a drop of The Last Dab because I said it was the hottest, and she said I was a monster for handling the amount that I did.

Anyway, all this is partially a setup for an outcome that happened  as a result of this interview the next day. Lee-Anne's question for me on the ninth wing, with Hellfire: Kranked was "What was your initial exposure to anime?" My answer was a cartoon called Friends of the Forest from when I was a young child, which at the time I wouldn't have been able to recognize as anime.

In fact, I made a post on this show last year: http://lairofthegryphon.blogspot.com/2021/05/friends-of-forest.html

Basically, when I was a teenager and the Internet was still young, I tried looking up my favourite childhood TV show. After some research, I found a Japanese version. Years later, a translation emerged, but it was different than the one I remembered, titled Fables of the Green Forest. Eventually, I found it acknowledged on Lost Media Wiki that there was a second translation, with an entirely different voice cast, titled Friends of the Forest. While there was a record of its existence, none of the actual content had emerged. It was hard for me because I had all the episodes taped on VHS, but we'd lost them.

I've been especially fixated on the theme song. I felt that it would have to rot away in my brain as an imperfect memory, never sure if it ever actually existed.

Just an infectious jingle, that only I remembered: Friends of the Forest, there's room for everyone

Anyway, because I described this to Lee-Anne as technically my first exposure to anime, and detailed my decades-long attempt to unearth evidence of the version from my youth, the next day she tried looking it up.

Without telling me she'd found anything, she nonchalantly played this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcfNfUmEpRM

I was shocked silent. As I heard the lyrics, they came back to me a moment before they were played.

I'd been searching for this for seventeen years

And now, I'll write down the lyrics here in case this video is ever lost (it sounds like the beginning was clipped off, but this is still a lot better than I ever expected to get).

We love the forest

There's room for everyone

Oh, Rocky

Rocky lives in a tree

He's so happy

Living where he wants to be

Come and join him

And all his animal pals

In adventures

Our stories filled with fun and laughter

We are friends of the forest

Lay all day in the sun

We love the forest

There's room for everyone

Oh, Rocky

You may not be as fast as a rabbit

You always get there last

When there's a problem

You know just what to do

Oh, Rocky~

We can always rely on you

We can always rely on you

We are friends of the forest

Lay all day in the sun

We love the forest

There's room for everyone

We are friends of the forest

Come and join the fun

We love the forest

There's room for everyone