BUSSING THAILAND (BUS because of you i shine's travel variety show)

[Wensuelrene]

Well damn, I was gonna pick the same episode, but it would be lame if we both pick the same one

I guess I'll pick both the waterpark episode and the final episode where they acted out the BL drama scenes~

The waterpark episode singlehandedly made AA shoot up my bias list He was just so unserious the whole time, acting like he was afraid of heights to get out of doing any of the games while his teammates just carried him~ And it seems like he did all this for NO REASON other than wanting to see if he could get away with it. SUPER silly behavior and I like silly It was also just really fun to watch in general watching some teams be so strategic about how they earned points while other teams just seemed to do whatever was right in front of them~ Defs in my top 3 episodes.

I also liked the acting episode because the members got to showcase a talent we haven't seen from most of them and a lot of them surprised me with how well they did, especially Nex Zhang. But a lot of them also did very well in their scenes and it was really fun to see how different members tackled the same scenes as other members. I also adored how they put all the cuties, foreigners, and actors on the same teams!

AA is the maknae on top, so they probably would have told him not to bother with anything even if he just straight up said it I'm still stunned at how he clowned the viewers with that stunt only to IMMEDIATELY have no issues ziplining in the literal next episode. Like bro just say you don't wanna get in the water

The BL episode was a close contender for me too. I still wish they would have shown more of the actual game vs. sitting around eating and promoting those damn water bottles. But judging just the game itself, I liked it because it was great to see how the other members aside from Khunpol and Copper are as on screen actors. The puppet show was great for voice acting and storytelling, but seeing them insert themselves into an existing production was nice. I'm still salty that Team Khunpol's final two scenes weren't submitted for points since they were easily the best to me.

Also whomst?

 

[Ddeona Oneul Bame]

Also whomst?

The main character

 

[Wensuelrene]

@Ddeona Oneul Bame

Wakey wakey! Time for our next discussion.

Question of the day: Which BUSSING THAILAND game did you think was poorly executed/could have been better?

For me it was definitely the picture challenges, specifically with episode 4's being my least favorite.

First of all, how do you do a photography challenge while only having a limited amount of cameras? You know you're working with a 12 member group, but only provide THREE FREAKING CAMERAS. Not even enough for half. No, only 1/4 of the group was able to do the challenge at a time while everyone else wandered around seeing the sights. There is really no excuse to to have more cameras. I can only assume that their 'logic' was that if everyone had a camera, no one would be worrying about getting their picture taken and would just be snapping everyone else, which I guess I can agree on. But still, they should have come up with a better rotational system aside form just trusting the members to handle it. Photoboys Alan and Marckris weren't trying to share their phototime with anyone

The to make matters worse, they had to take so many different kinds of pictures. A picture of each member, a non selfie of themself, a selfie with the group, a non selfie unique, artistic group photo, and 6 landscape photos...... Literally who thought this was a good idea? It says a lot that 3 people didn't submit any landscape photos, just barely half of the group submitted a non selfie of themself, Jinwook was the sole person who submitted a selfie with the group, and a bunch of other members went without submitting some members.

It sucks because in theory this was an interesting challenge, I just feel they needed more cameras, or at the very least more time to execute it. Maybe they could have tried to play for a few more hours, idk, but yeah episode 4's challenge was my least fav.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Ddeona says.

 

[Ddeona Oneul Bame]

I pretty much agree that I didn't care much for most of the photography challenges. Any of them, really. The one you mentioned was definitely one of the most questionable. I really can't fathom why they wouldn't have at least six cameras so half the group could do what they needed to do and be able to switch in time for the other members to take photographs.
It's weird to me how that was even allowed? I mean it pretty much is unfair that it's possible to not even have a chance to complete the challenge if the other member just decides he doesn't wanna give up his camera. I know it's just for fun, but I would legit be pissed if I didn't even have an opportunity to play the game.

The other issue with the photography challenges is that they often feel like they go on forever. The first episode, I felt really had this problem. And I guess it was also a consequence of them being underwater, but the members can't talk or really be all that entertaining while they're underwater, so it it kinda feels like you're just watching a nature documentary more than anything. And I kinda would prefer seeing some entertaining, witty commentary from the boys, so I wish they could have just maybe photographed a few things underwater and then done something else on land. They could even have still been swimming, so they could speak rather than spend the whole time diving. But the fact that they had so many pictures to take, watching the guys swim around underwater for over an hour isn't really the most riveting content, IMO.

If they ever do this in the future, I really hope they tone down on the challenges that just involve taking pictures. There's really much more interesting stuff they could have done besides spending hours underwater taking pictures of fish and rocks.

 

[Wensuelrene]

I pretty much agree that I didn't care much for most of the photography challenges. Any of them, really. The one you mentioned was definitely one of the most questionable. I really can't fathom why they wouldn't have at least six cameras so half the group could do what they needed to do and be able to switch in time for the other members to take photographs.
It's weird to me how that was even allowed? I mean it pretty much is unfair that it's possible to not even have a chance to complete the challenge if the other member just decides he doesn't wanna give up his camera. I know it's just for fun, but I would legit be pissed if I didn't even have an opportunity to play the game.

The other issue with the photography challenges is that they often feel like they go on forever. The first episode, I felt really had this problem. And I guess it was also a consequence of them being underwater, but the members can't talk or really be all that entertaining while they're underwater, so it it kinda feels like you're just watching a nature documentary more than anything. And I kinda would prefer seeing some entertaining, witty commentary from the boys, so I wish they could have just maybe photographed a few things underwater and then done something else on land. They could even have still been swimming, so they could speak rather than spend the whole time diving. But the fact that they had so many pictures to take, watching the guys swim around underwater for over an hour isn't really the most riveting content, IMO.

If they ever do this in the future, I really hope they tone down on the challenges that just involve taking pictures. There's really much more interesting stuff they could have done besides spending hours underwater taking pictures of fish and rocks.

I honestly forgot about episode 1's picture challenge. Honestly, the only thing that saved that challenge was being tied to the goofy bingo game in episode 2. But yeah, I think the diving was cool to see for the beauty of the water, but not so interesting for a fan of the group wanting to see silly shenanigans between the members. Especially since it's not like they even gave them a list of what to take a picture of for episode one. They were just snapping pics randomly only to later be told that they'd need specific images for the game. Meaning if they happened to not get it, oh well I guess....

 

[Ddeona Oneul Bame]

I honestly forgot about episode 1's picture challenge. Honestly, the only thing that saved that challenge was being tied to the goofy bingo game in episode 2. But yeah, I think the diving was cool to see for the beauty of the water, but not so interesting for a fan of the group wanting to see silly shenanigans between the members. Especially since it's not like they even gave them a list of what to take a picture of for episode one. They were just snapping pics randomly only to later be told that they'd need specific images for the game. Meaning if they happened to not get it, oh well I guess....

It's such a weird way to start the series if you're new to BUS, you really don't learn much about each member in the first episode If I wasn't forced at knifepoint to watch this show, I might have not even bothered watching past episode one with this first impression Thankfully, the later episodes were better in this regard for the most part

 

[Wensuelrene]

@Ddeona Oneul Bame Discussion day is here

Time for a different type of question. What did you think of the length of the show, both in terms of episode length and how long it aired? And how do you think they handled the airtime for the challenges and everything else shown throughout the episodes?

As a reminder, there were 13 episodes and each episode was around an hour long. Episodes 6 (Peem's fam) and 9 (kiyaking) are the only ones that didn't hit 1 hour. Meanwhile only episodes 7 (talking to npcs + campfire ) and 13 (final) were far longer and were closer to 90 minutes.

The questions here are

1. Do you think the episode length was okay for the show as a whole? Should each episode have been around the same length, or should it have been based on the activity in kestion? From this you can also talk about if you think they allotted time well for everything shown, or if some things should have been cut/rearranged/added/etc.

2. Was 13 episodes enough for the show? Could it have been longer or shorter?

First of all, I'd say 1 hour was okay for the episodes. Considering this is the first variety show for a brand new large group, I think having at least an hour is necessary to at least try to give all of the members decent screentime. I do feel like they could have paced things better though. Of course not every single solitary second was going to be of challenges, because they wanted to show the members interacting with each other, the rankings, and things such as.

But you already know what my biggest problem was I think some episodes dedicated way too much time to pointless stuff over the actual challenges. My biggest examples of this are Episodes 11 and 13. Episode 13 had the pointless scenes of the members eating instead of filming the drama scenes. Yes I know they need to advertise the water for Nestle, but come on, we didn't need 5 minutes of the members eating. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 5 minutes of the challenge we could have gotten. Also add that to the scenes of the members just traveling from place to place. In my opinion, none of that was necessary. And this goes for the whole show. The scenes of the members just sitting in a taxi or just walking from one destination to the next, were not necessary.


Episode 11 (water park) really bugged me, because they spent way too much time showing the members fking standing in line, and running from ride to ride, and very little time of them actually riding the rides. They legit dedicated over 20 minutes to just showing a single ride for 2 different teams. Then toward the end of the episode they spammed a clip show of them doing a bunch of rides they didn't show earlier. I don't know why we needed to see every member going on the same ride over and over. Just show different members going on different rides all day. Or show them all going on one ride once each. We didn't need to see Marckris and Heart sliding on the same slide like 5 times. They only dedicated a few hours to this activity, which is also insane to me because this to me should have been something they set aside for all day. Yes I know they had limited filming time across the 15 day trip, but here is where I start to feel that some challenges should have been removed for others to last longer (though this might wind up being a future discussion question) .


Episode 7 was done so oddly to me. The main focus was the episode was clearly the 30 minute campfire session at the end of the episode, but this lead to the 50 minutes of the actual challenge feeling rushed. They basically spammed through the members wandering around talking to the npcs and we missed most of their actual conversations for the challenge itself.


And here is where I discuss if 13 episodes was enough. Technically I do, HOWEVER, I really feel like they should have done 15. First of all, I'm gonna say I think the water park episode should have been done through 2 episodes. That gives them more time to actually show the members going on all of those rides instead of having to clip show through a bunch of stuff at the tail end.

Next, I think they should have removed the campfire scene episode 7 and just let that be the NPC hunt. Then they should let episode 13 ONLY be the acting challenge and take out the final remarks at the end. Finally, mash the campfire session from episode 7 and the final remarks on the show in episode 13 into one final episode 15th episode. Honestly speaking, the campfire scene gave 'final episode reminiscing' vibes anyway. I don't know why it wasn't in the final episode to begin with.

So tldr, if it were up to me, the show would be diving (1), bingo (2), hornbills (3), photos (4), sports (5), Peem (6), npcs (7), puppets (8), kiyaking (9), more photos (10), water park 1 (11), water park 2 (12), zipline (13) acting (14), campfire + finale (15)

This was partially an excuse for me to rant about my least favorite episodes, but I'm still interested in hearing Ddeona unnie's perspective as a casual BEUS

 

[Ddeona Oneul Bame]

This is an easy discussion question

1. Do you think the episode length was okay for the show as a whole? Should each episode have been around the same length, or should it have been based on the activity in kestion? From this you can also talk about if you think they allotted time well for everything shown, or if some things should have been cut/rearranged/added/etc.

I wanna say yes and no Yes, because I think around an hour is not too bad for the episode length. But at the same time, some episodes and challenges DEFS overstayed their welcome. Anything with photo taking, especially underwater, lasted way too long. If that was around a thirty minute episode, I wouldn't have minded. An hour of just photo-taking is not interesting even for the biggest of BEUS, I imagine. To me, I don't mind if the episodes are the same length or not, as long as the whole thing is interesting for 90% of it, some could be an hour, some could be 45 minutes. But the way we can have a super interesting episode like the water basketball or the waterpark feeling like they could have been much longer while also having to sit through over an hour of taking pictures and dancing underwater feels unbalanced

And some episodes also really misused their time. Why is it that we need to see the members traveling from one spot to the next so often, like in the Busking episode? Why do we need to see them eating when it isn't a sponsorship or has nothing to do with the episode? How come we have just so much filler as though there isn't plenty of content that got cut out? Also, do we really need to see them picking and choosing which photos they submitted? Can't we just see them when they show the results? That time could have been allocated to another game, or even just some fun shenanigans between the members. There was definitely a lot to be desired in that respect, but it did get better as the show went on, so I will say that.

2. Was 13 episodes enough for the show? Could it have been longer or shorter?

NO IT WAS NOT ENOUGH As soon as I start learning the members and becoming invested, the show just ends?? No, I'm not okay with this at all, unnir 13 is such a random number, at least give me 20~ They could have traveled to some more places or done more interesting challenges in some of the places we saw. Only one episode really dedicated to acting when there's several actors in BUS? So few sports related activities when the members are clearly good at them? It's not fair, we should have had more.

 

[Wensuelrene]

This is an easy discussion question

1. Do you think the episode length was okay for the show as a whole? Should each episode have been around the same length, or should it have been based on the activity in kestion? From this you can also talk about if you think they allotted time well for everything shown, or if some things should have been cut/rearranged/added/etc.

I wanna say yes and no Yes, because I think around an hour is not too bad for the episode length. But at the same time, some episodes and challenges DEFS overstayed their welcome. Anything with photo taking, especially underwater, lasted way too long. If that was around a thirty minute episode, I wouldn't have minded. An hour of just photo-taking is not interesting even for the biggest of BEUS, I imagine. To me, I don't mind if the episodes are the same length or not, as long as the whole thing is interesting for 90% of it, some could be an hour, some could be 45 minutes. But the way we can have a super interesting episode like the water basketball or the waterpark feeling like they could have been much longer while also having to sit through over an hour of taking pictures and dancing underwater feels unbalanced

And some episodes also really misused their time. Why is it that we need to see the members traveling from one spot to the next so often, like in the Busking episode? Why do we need to see them eating when it isn't a sponsorship or has nothing to do with the episode? How come we have just so much filler as though there isn't plenty of content that got cut out? Also, do we really need to see them picking and choosing which photos they submitted? Can't we just see them when they show the results? That time could have been allocated to another game, or even just some fun shenanigans between the members. There was definitely a lot to be desired in that respect, but it did get better as the show went on, so I will say that.

2. Was 13 episodes enough for the show? Could it have been longer or shorter?

NO IT WAS NOT ENOUGH As soon as I start learning the members and becoming invested, the show just ends?? No, I'm not okay with this at all, unnir 13 is such a random number, at least give me 20~ They could have traveled to some more places or done more interesting challenges in some of the places we saw. Only one episode really dedicated to acting when there's several actors in BUS? So few sports related activities when the members are clearly good at them? It's not fair, we should have had more.

I agree so much unnie! They could have cut out so much traveling and fking Nestle and given us the content! I will forever be bitter about the sht they didn't give us I just thought about how they ended the water basketball so kickly when they could have cut out that breath holding challenge all together. Or at the very LEAST they could have made it like a Youtube bonus "extra scene" type of thing. Heck, a LOT of these scenes could have been held off for just Youtube. On that note, it's crazy we never got ANY bonus scenes even though it's clear they cut so much out. Forget season 2, give me the lost scenes of season 1!


I feel like they wanted to do an episode count that was close to the number of members, but it was so dumb because it doesn't work if they don't literally do 12. 16 episodes should have been the minimum since there were 15 days of the trip, plus the initial traveling day. I think 20 would have been better to at least not make it feel like so much was cut across these challenges. Otherwise, the only other answer would be to make the episodes damn near 2 hours, which I think would have been overwhelming.

 

[Ddeona Oneul Bame]

I agree so much unnie! They could have cut out so much traveling and fking Nestle and given us the content! I will forever be bitter about the sht they didn't give us I just thought about how they ended the water basketball so kickly when they could have cut out that breath holding challenge all together. Or at the very LEAST they could have made it like a Youtube bonus "extra scene" type of thing. Heck, a LOT of these scenes could have been held off for just Youtube. On that note, it's crazy we never got ANY bonus scenes even though it's clear they cut so much out. Forget season 2, give me the lost scenes of season 1!


I feel like they wanted to do an episode count that was close to the number of members, but it was so dumb because it doesn't work if they don't literally do 12. 16 episodes should have been the minimum since there were 15 days of the trip, plus the initial traveling day. I think 20 would have been better to at least not make it feel like so much was cut across these challenges. Otherwise, the only other answer would be to make the episodes damn near 2 hours, which I think would have been overwhelming.

Well, they can't cut out our paid advertisements It is interesting how we didn't get any behind the scenes or anything like that, though. They could have put it on Youtube or Tik Tok or something. Oh well, maybe they will release it eventually?