Hello, you're watching AvenueX and today let's talk about two recently finished airing
chinese super short drama, Dong Lan Xue, and Quan Zi Jin Zu
In this video, I will talk about these two dramas separately
first talking about Dong Lan Xue,which doesn't have an English title.
So its english title is still Dong Lan Xue
The other one Quan Zi Jin Zu has an english title called An Actor's Rhapsody
The Dong Lan Xue drama airs officially on Kuai Shou,
which is another chinese TikTok Kind of short video platform,
you should be able to find the whole drama already on YouTube.
Actor's Rhapsody is an iqiyi drama.
Let's first start with Dong Lan Xue
Last year I made a video about super short dramas becoming really popular in china and getting a lot of audience
Dong Lan Xue is the second coming of last year's super popular Zhang Gong Zhu Zai Shang
it's led by the same two actor/actress, Dong Lan Xue has28 episodes officially,
but I think on YouTube has a different number does not matter. It's very short.
Every episode is only 1.5 minute to 3 minutes
and we do have this drama in horizontal traditional drama viewport instead of a vertical viewport,
the two characters kind of switch their position in the story,
last year's Zhang Gong Zhu Zai Shang as the title suggests,
it's about a princess and her bodyguard.
This year they switched that around, It's about a prince and his bodyguard, assassin, slash teacher and lover.
In terms of production quality, budget, acting,
the two actors are definitely getting better with their acting
and feeling more comfortable in front of the camera.
The chemistry also works really well.
Overall, i'd say the storytelling quality and pacing is slightly improved upon last year's work.
This is again a perfect loo time drama.
If you don't have magazines or books to read on,
you can watch this type of 3 minutes episode drama.
This type of super short dramas, it concentrates the plot to the maximum,
reduce every detail to the minimum.
And it's the ultimate type of fast food in dramaland.
You're not looking for groundbreaking performances.
You're not looking for a long through line that gradually gets built up about characters.
You just get moment to moment, expectation or unexpected delivery of plot point
So it is pretty much impossible to get the type of satisfaction you can get from a traditional narrative length drama,
but as a super show drama that's designed for very specific purpose
being consumed on a very specific platform. It's still a pretty nice work.
This drama did really well while it was on air
pretty much like last year's ZGZZS
And if it's your type of thing and cup of tea and you have an apple hour in total to burn
on a story that is very typical in its setup.
But whatever you want in this story that you can expect,
you will get delivered and satisfied type of story.
You can go and check out this one, won't be disappointed,
probably will be slightly more entertained than last year's Princess is on Top.
So that's our first short drama in this video.
The next one got delivered I think in one go
24 episodes on the platform iqiyi on the day A pril the 28th.
Once it was out there, it really got quite a lot of attention from the internet
and people really enjoyed this drama.
So i'll talk a little bit more about this rather unusual production.
Chinese title of this drama is Quan Zi Jin Zu, which in itself is already a very satirical title.
In china we have a saying in drama land of certain actor or actress going into a crew
taking a role in a drama, Dai Zi Jin Zu actor or actress
bringing money in and entering this crew.
So they come in with money.
Maybe they are tied with certain investors.
They can be you know like baby of nepotism or they could be just related to big money
who have a say in the whole production.
They kind of can do whatever they want.
And often they mess up with the actual creative process of the drama.
And the drama title is Quan Zi Jin Zu which means full money.
Our main lead character is the sole investor of the whole drama
imagine how messy that could become because he basically has the say over everything
and english translation of this title officially is An Actor's Rhapsody.
I think that's pretty clever. So what is this drama?
24 episodes, every episode about 10 minutes, very similar to the drama that i've
recently talked about, Provoke on Tencent,
but this one is super special in every other way,
it really is produced, invested and then led by the same person.
The male lead actor Chen Tengyue is also the producer and investor.
so he is a in fact, Quan Zi Jin Zu actor who Quan Zi Jin Zu invested in this drama.
It's done by his own company, he hired a professional director to do it,
but he is the actual boss of this drama within and without
we start this drama looking like it's a normal period drama,
but immediately you will realize it is a drama being shot
So you'll see the contemporary people who are with camera shooting the drama.
It got stopped by the producer who is our male lead actor,
calling the star that he hired for his drama who's suppose chose to be on set.
But that day she has a red carpet event and she couldn't come.
So they had a stand in person with a face completely covered in green cloth
that will be later digitally removed and changed with the female lead actress' face.
You will see our producer calling that person and saying you're fired.
If you don't come to my show, i'm gonna rewrite this script and then do it myself.
So that's how our story starts, our male lead actor is the producer of a drama
he completely invests and wants to make.
But along the way, he will come across all kinds of classic situations
that gets rented about a lot in chinese drama production these days,
he will force the scriptwriter who is following this crew shooting to rewrite the story.
So we will have period idol drama, we will have wu xia, mystery crime, classic romantic story,
we will even have Goodbye princess that type of male lead and female lead are actually mortal enemies
because one destroyed the other person's whole family clan.
You would even have the chinese period drama version of the film Leon the professional,
many years ago, classic movie about a girl and an assassin.
The story keeps changing and the producer keeps complaining
and the script writer keeps getting more angry, but was forced to write,
because she needs her bill get paid. It gets to the final point where she had this explosion,
and she decided she is gonna control the whole thing and writes a story she wants.
And it will end with a really cool scene of the people shooting stuff on set
as different workers on set, such as stand in double, such as makeup artist,
cameraman, extras, everybody ranting and it's a long take of them walking through the set and ranting about stuff.
As a drama production, although it's very short,
it's actually a quite acceptable standard production in terms of camera work, music, acting
because this drama is one male lead and he keeps changing the story.
Therefore there are actually nine different female leads.
and they're all really pretty and really good actress and play the roles brilliantly.
And there's a lot of comedy moments along the line as you can imagine,
because it really rant about everything you can think of in chinese dramaland
such as why the male lead and female lead always ends up kissing.
Did they have magnets attached to their lips?
How could somebody who's just had their next kin murdered in front of them
or died in front of them, Immediately next scene cut to a fall in love with the female lead
and about to have sex.
It is really a collection of everything that i've ranted about about chinese dramaland
I think most chinese drama reviewers have ranted about over the last five years or so.
And it gets summarized and presented to you in a very ridiculous and funny way in this drama.
After i've watched this drama and I did a bit research, this male lead actor,
who is also the producer and investor, he had a really colorful personal entrepreneurship over the years,
he made money in very weird ways, he has his own skin care brand.
And in this drama, he would actually inject his brand in
and forcing the actors read out the brand in the most ridiculous, funny way.
It completes two things at the same time which is promoting his own brand,
but also laughing at chinese dramaland.
And this guy said in a live stream recently that there are actually two more stories in the drama that they've shot.
One is about two episodes long, the other one is about 4 episodes long.
So the original length of this drama is actually 32 episodes,
certain stories didn't pass censorship.
And there's one story that he said if there ever was an opportunity to put it out as special feature he would,
which I really want to watch now, a xian xia, fantasy idol story,
the male lead is a piece of ice, and icycle that's been sitting there for thousands of years
and cultivated, then the female lead is a penguin, who also gets cultivated and had power.
Then the other male second is a seagull, also got cultivated
and they will have the classic four episodes, so about 40 minutes long story
of being in the sort of like heavenly realm,
and then they have to jump off the Zhu Xian Tai, you know that place
where pretty much in every fantasy drama you have.
When you jump off, you lose your ability you become human.
and in his story setting that place is actually really, really sought after among the immorals,
because they all want to jump off and become a lead of their story and having trial period,
and then afterwards they can upgrade or whatever.
So the immortals queue up before that place and you actually have to pay money to jump off.
I now really want to see the story between a penguin and icycle and a seagull,
and paying money to jump off the platform to become a human.
And if you don't look at it as a satire on current chinese dramaland,
but just look at it as a normal drama, among the 8/9 short stories this drama has
certain small unit stories really have very good acting moments,
and you're almost like this is done by a crew that in many ways you wouldn't even think think of them as super professional,
they're like semi professional people and they're just having fun.
And this person who did the whole project, Chen Tengyue is doing it as his passion project,
he is also not the super professional people in this field,
but because they love what they're doing and they know they have a really interesting project on hand,
so they put 100%, 110% into it, and actually made those moments work so much better
than a lot of crappy dramas you're seeing that are "professional" dramas that have S+ rating
that have a lot of money invested in it and turned out to be a complete mess
in itself that becomes even more ironic, right? that that is happening to this drama
and the funny thing is this was shot like last year,
so they couldn't have predicted what would happen when this drama airs this year end of April
and we all know right now in China the ~~~~that that drama is like top top top like~~~ thing
in the fandom fighting land of things.
And it's such an ironic and coincidental thing that a lot of the things An Actor's Rhapsody have ranted about
are happening right now next door on the other platform.
So I think that's one reason more why when people discover this short drama,
they got even more excited and I almost feel iqiyi intentionally put this drama out at this time.
This creator of this show said they really wanna make the second season of this
or even more smaller projects in the future.
He has a couple of projects lined up already.
And because of the small success of this really unusual, short drama,
he's already been contacted by a lot of professional big investors in dramaland
who all showed him great interest in collaborating with him for future bigger projects.
So fingers crossed that this guy is gonna get better resources to make more fun content.
Also fingers crossed that he doesn't really get affected,
by those money and still can stick to his very pure intention.
I mean he's a boss of his own company and he is able to invest and solely take on the responsibility of making a drama.
So i'm pretty sure that he has things to fall back on,
so he wouldn't become completely manipulated by other people's money,
but who knows? Best hope for this guy and for his team.
These are the two short dramas I managed to catch recently and had quite a lot of fun.
So I would recommend them to you.
They are in every way much easier to digest as dramas compared to normal length dramas.
And definitely you'll only have laughter and happiness and enjoyment after watching them
without suffering from any messy things that comes with bit such as fandom fights and whatever
that should end this video, thank you for watching AvenueX
I'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.