After three days of semi-finals, the final 24 contestants were selected.
According to the original plan, the finals were supposed to start a day later. However, the 24 contestants received a notice that the finals would be delayed by a week.
Of course, during this period, the organizing committee would cover all the expenses for food, clothing, housing, and transportation. They also provided 500 USD per day as compensation. With such generous conditions, the contestants naturally had nothing to say. They even felt like they had made a fortune.
The reason why the organizing committee delayed the finals wasn't the same as before. It wasn't because they didn't have enough time … No, it wasn't wrong to say that they didn't have enough time. It was because the Pokemon World Championship was now live.
Speaking of which, the mini 4WD had a part to play in this.
The situation was like this. In fact, long before the competition started, Boss Jia had already thought about how to maximize the benefits of the competition. After all, they couldn't just lose 5 million USD. The landlord didn't have any extra money!
However, it wasn't appropriate to broadcast the Pokemon World Championship. First of all, there were too many people in the preliminaries and semi-finals. You wouldn't even know how lousy a live broadcast was. In fact, it was difficult to broadcast the competition.
It wasn't like the future esports era, where there were very skilled game broadcast techniques. In this era, there was no concept of game broadcast at all. Moreover, the game broadcast was on a gigabyte.
The gigabyte only had a connection to a computer and an opening to input some data. The entire gigabyte didn't have any data ports. You couldn't even connect to a computer, let alone a video camera.
In short, it was very difficult to broadcast a gigabyte competition!
Therefore, Boss Jia thought of his own mini 4WD League team in China.
At this time, the mini 4WD League had already been developed for three years. Although the rules of the league were still the same, there were some changes.
First of all, the mini 4WD League became a tangram … Oh, no, at the end of 1993, the tangram program was officially reorganized. It was expanded from the previous 40 minutes to an hour. At the same time, the program name was changed to the more familiar name of our childhood, Windmill.
The mini 4WD League had long become a must-have program for the Windmill program. Or rather, it was a must-have program for all the children's media in the country. Almost all the children's programs in the country would purchase the copyright of the mini 4WD League and broadcast it in their own programs.
It couldn't be helped. Due to Boss Jia's operation, the mini 4WD didn't disappear like a meteor in the past. Instead, it became quite long-lasting. Even after three years, the mini 4WD was still very popular. It was also one of the children's favorite toys. The Daqian announced that it would sell more than 1,000 types of mini 4WD parts.
Although the 4WD League was still a single-player competition, there were already teams forming.
Because once a child won the national 4WD championship … even if it was only a provincial championship, this child would be considered a small celebrity among the children. They would be able to participate in various activities, and some children would even be invited to film movies and the like.
For example, the second national champion, Cao Jun, was a well-known child star. However, he had recently made a big fuss because he wanted to shave his head to play the role of a young monk.
At the same time, some car brands would invite these small celebrities to endorse them, or simply change the name of their mini 4WD to Super Benz, Invincible Audi, Charging BMW, and so on.
Therefore, if a child could win the national championship or a provincial championship, not only would they receive a generous bonus, but they would also receive a lot of other benefits.
Therefore, teams, which seemed to only appear in formal large-scale racing competitions, had already appeared in the mini 4WD League.
At first, teams were just a prototype set up by some rich parents, but later, some commercial organizations realized the future of the mini 4WD League and joined it, making the team professional.
The team would usually help the children to maintain the mini 4WD, collect information about their opponents, and develop the best equipment configuration for different terrains. Some teams even began to develop their own exclusive parts and so on.
Of course, the team was also responsible for accepting advertisements, endorsements, and sponsorship deals. Anyway, it was already on a small scale.
Ahem, it seems that I've gone off topic. Let's get back to the topic.
The mini 4WD League was also not suitable for live broadcast. After all, a day would pass after a competition. How could a program like Windmill have so much time to broadcast the competition live?
Therefore, the program broadcast by the TV station was actually a recorded and edited version. The organizing committee specially invited some professional editors and directors to edit hundreds of hours of material into a documentary of about 20 minutes to an hour. In this way, the essence of the entire competition was condensed in a short hour of content, allowing the children to enjoy it.
And this was only the beginning. Later, with the demand of the program's market, these editors and directors also started to become crafty. They no longer followed the normal logic of editing. Instead, they would deliberately make some contradictions erupt, then activate, then collide, and then edit together the climax of the program. They would then reverse the timeline and even invert the characters.
For example, at the beginning of an episode, you could see a former champion of a sub-race looking down on a newbie very disdainfully, saying that he would definitely torture the newbie.
As a result, the two sides began to quarrel, collide, and then agreed to fight on the battlefield. In the end, the newbie successfully turned the tables. The newbie defeated the previous champion and became the new king.
But in fact, if you knew the truth, you would realize that the opponent that the champion was looking down on was actually the previous champion. The opponent did not ridicule the newbie at all.
And the one who collided with the newbie was also someone else. These were just cleverly edited together, making it look very melodramatic.
Although it was very unorthodox and was simply a remake of Metamorphosis, one had to admit that the effect was very good, and the ratings were very high.
Therefore, this time, Boss Jia directly brought this team over and asked them to edit 500 hours of video of the preliminary competition into a 60-minute documentary of the competition.
You can imagine, with such a shameless team and a scale of 20,000 people, how explosive the story could be edited?
Anyway, after being edited by the Daqian team, a one-hour documentary full of contradictions, fights, outbursts, hard work, luck, revenge, don't look down on the poor, the invincible Europeans, and other elements and plots was shot.
Then, taking advantage of the popularity, it was directly broadcasted on children's television stations in various countries under Fox Television. The result was, of course, violent. All the children, including some adults who were watching TV with children, were provoked by this documentary. They could not wait to watch the follow-up immediately and see the results of the semi-finals.
But Boss Jia's team was not supermen. They also needed to rest. It was already very impressive that they spent 48 hours editing a one-hour documentary, but at this time, the semi-finals had already been going on for two days.
If you let the gold medal team rest and continue editing the resources for the semi-finals, it would take at least 72 hours. However, according to Boss Jia's plan, the finals would still have to be broadcasted live. This way, it would be able to generate higher viewership ratings and results.
Therefore, in order to ensure that the documentary of the semi-finals could be broadcasted before the finals, the finals could only be delayed by a week. This was very normal.
Yes, very normal.
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