Robot Combat League

[Unicron]

Anyone planning to watch? I haven't quite decided yet, but it looks like it might be some good silly fun.

[Mark_Nguyen]

I watched the first episode yesterday (did we get it early in Canada?). It was okay, pretty standard reality fare with editing and added sparks and fluids spraying about to make the fights look more exciting. I won't be tuning in regularly, but if you're into robot smash and can weather the reality TV tropes, you'll be entertained.

Mark

[Garak]

Yeah the sparks and gushing fluid are kind of lame, plus the things can't even stand up on their own.

This will not last.

[Unicron]

I used to enjoy watching BattleBots back in the day, and it's hard to judge if this has the same charm. BattleBots was campy and silly in its own right, but I think it had the advantage of having more realistic vehicles based on specific engineering principles.

[Mark_Nguyen]

Part of the old Robot Wars charm was that people actually BUILT their drones and drove them about. Here, specially chosen (read: cast for looks as much as background - one contestant is a "superhero impersonator" as her job) are ASSIGNED a robot built for the show.

The robot smash is kinda fun, but I also don't see it lasting.

Mark

[Christopher]

I caught just a minute or two and wasn't interested. What was fun about those old shows like Robot Wars and Battlebots was the range of different designs, abilities, and strategies the robots had, which is lost when they're all just humanoid torsos with different surface stylings. I don't really see the appeal of a show built around an oversized game of Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

And if it is built around "reality TV tropes" as Mark says, then I don't think I'd be interested. What a shame that we can't have real reality anymore, that it all has to be so formulaic and full of artifice rather than just being the kind of legitimate robotics competition that those old shows were.