It would have been good enough if they just showed the contest with lazy dubs, but there were some damn clever jokes in this show.
The most depressing thing about television is that, with all the hundreds of channels for EVERYTHING right now, we still don't have a dedicated Asian gameshow channel. Instead of showing those, they always try to do an American remake and it always turns out embarrassingly terrible.
It's a formula that shouldn't have worked but did. MXC had a lot of personality. Captain Tennielle's weary "llllllets go!" is still one of my favorite battlecries.
What sold it for me was the attention paid to background sound, the way you could hear the contestants awful quips and distressed screams behind the main dialogue.
This show was hypnotizing. I remember they would have a marathon going on some random weekend and we would waste the entire day saying, "Okay. This is the last episode, then we are turning it off and doing something else". Just to never accomplish anything.