This John Daub would have handled things differently

/ hsoi

My name is John Daub.

If you search for “John Daub” online, you’re most likely to encounter me or John Daub, President of Weblish, a Japanese company that started as an online school but has become a media company. John and I don’t know each other, but we’ve crossed paths before for obvious reasons. 🙂  One thing that I also find amusing is we’re both of similar ethnic background, being part Asian then this rather “white German” name.

I follow John on Twitter and the other day he tweeted about this video: Jason gets mugged!

Go watch.

Now note, this is a lesson on causative verbs, like “make”, “have”, “let”, and “get”. So don’t put much stock into what I’m about to say. I found the video fun and silly, and certainly a good storyline for such a language lesson.

But as I watched, I couldn’t help but think about the mugging scenario. How it unfolded, how Jason handled the mugging, especially when it came to the defense of Olga. How would THIS John Daub — living in Texas, not Japan — would have handled things much differently.

Can you guess what I would have done differently in this video?

 

 

 

I wouldn’t have worn panty hose on my head.  🙂

5 thoughts on “This John Daub would have handled things differently”

  1. Wow, what a hilarious video.

    That mugger is talented — did you count how many times the handgun changed from one hand to the other?
    Or how many times he simply put it away?

    I also think that you would have fallen down laughing at the graduates of the William Shatner School of Overacting.

    • Oh yeah, the production was cheesy… but, it’s intended for a Japanese audience so it’s actually quite tame, relatively speaking. 🙂

      I thought it was good for what they were attempting to do, teach language and be humorous. They accomplished both. 🙂

  3. Haha! Thanks for taking notice and for the plug, John Daub. A Texan in a mugging? I’d love to see that play out, hopefully with a happy ending.
    The productions are super low budget and made in little time, but are planned that way. This one was made when I first started. The silliness is essential — Japanese take learning a language too seriously. They can’t talk to others because they fear making a mistake in public. When they see a teacher being silly like this, they realize learning a language is not as serious as they thought. One learns from his/her mistakes. (…but I’d hate to see a mistake happen in the middle of a mugging!) The situation: everyone studies things like “Making a Hotel Reservation” or “Ordering at a Restaurant”. Try something unorthodox and people will talk about it (for better or for worse). Great buzz and super interesting for students. Believe it or not, this got quite a good number of downloads on iTunes and some Tokyo media coverage — and it may have helped the mugging process go a little bit smoother for someone somewhere 😛 BTW, sorry for topping the “John Daub” Google search and ruining our good name! haha~
    -John Daub, an Indian-German-English-American guy in Tokyo

    • Hi John. You’re welcome.

      I think the productions are great and make a lot of sense. Sure it’s cheesy, but it does a good job and your success is obvious testimony that it works!

      Don’t worry about our good name… we’ll both have fun with it. 😉

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