Peelander-Z Survives the Gong!

International Men of Mystery: Peelanders Green, Purple & Yellow, with Mike Myers (r) on The Gong Show

“I was ready to hate them,” actor Joel McHale admitted after watching Peelander-Z perform on ABC’s absurdist talent competition The Gong Show last night. “And I just didn’t want to run up to hit the gong, because I’m a little sore from a pretty big ab workout.”

As the Austin-sponsored Japanese punk threesome showed off an abbreviated medley of their live performance gags, including a few bars of the band’s anthem “So Many Mike,” as well as some dancing, jumping rope, and human bowling – in which frontman Kengo Hioki is heaved into a set of bowling pins – none of the judges dared reach for the mallet. Per tradition, dating back to the original Gong Show in the Seventies, any judge striking the gong means the contestants are through.

“I was a little scared,” Hioki admitted via phone last night. “Sometimes they hit the gong, sometimes they don’t.”

Several acts, including an shabbily-costumed owl man poorly singing the Jackson 5’s “(Owl) Be There,” exited the stage mid-schtick with a loud, humiliating “gongggggg.” Peelander-Z, who taped the episode last May in Los Angeles, suffered no such fate and host Tommy Maitland was shown dancing while they played. Maitland is actually Mike Myers, disguised in Austin Powers-like prosthetics – makeup, wig, false teeth, and a British accent – playing a character so strange and unremarkable you wonder if the comedy superstar owes money to the IRS.

Asked whether he got to meet Myers backstage, Hioki admitted, “I didn’t know it was him.”

An act wins the The Gong Show by getting the highest cumulative score from judges. Reno 911! actress Wendy Anne McLendon-Covey gave the band a 10 – as did McHale. Fellow judge Priyanka Chopra, who’d been rewarding bogus performers with 10s all episode, lowballed Peelander-Z with a seven, which caused them to narrowly lose the grand prize, a whopping $2,000.17, to a couple of children with a Trump & Pence impression routine.

Peelander-Z, longtime mainstays of local imprint Chicken Ranch Records, appears at Barracuda on Sept. 10.