The Downtown comedy duo — comprising Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada — are sitting on a train speeding towards Narita Airport outside Tokyo. It's not like they're going anywhere, or doing anything, even — they're just sitting there and waiting for something to happen. "Something" in this case is a gag carefully engineered in advance by their team of comedian acolytes.
This is vintage Downtown — from a mid-1990s episode of the television program "Downtown no Gottsu Ee Kanji (Downtown's Feeling Real Good)" — and the pair are in their element, giggling expectantly as they watch suburban Chiba Prefecture whiz by from the train's elevated vantage point. Big concrete buildings give way to houses, which give way to broad rivers and then fields — and then the gag arrives, albeit in staccato glimpses caught from the speeding train's window.
First there's what looks like a wearable plush giraffe suit lying in a field. A few seconds later, there's another. "Eleking! Eleking's dead!" Hamada cries out in shock at the apparent demise of what is not a giraffe at all, but a monster from a 1960s live-action sci-fi TV show.
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