To paraphrase Jurassic Park: God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs, God creates man, man destroys God, man creates robots, robots fight each other, man watches while eating nachos.
During BattleBots‘s two-year run, it always seemed a little weird that the show was on Comedy Central. Watching robots fight each other isn’t inherently funny—at least, not in the same way watching Jon Stewart rip into GOP hypocrisy or that show where puppets made prank phone calls were inherently funny. What made the show’s placement on the network make even the slightly semblance of sense was that a large segment of robots on the show simply didn’t work. They immediately fell apart at their opponent’s first thwack; they spin wildly out of control for no reason; sometimes, they didn’t even move at all.
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The show’s robots all had a homemade and it was kind of funny to watch that either break or not work in the first place.
More than a dozen years after BattleBots went off the air in 2002, the show is coming back. Deadline reports that ABC is teaming with the producers of the original series to bring BattleBots back as a reality show this summer.
Bots on the new show will still be homemade, but the choice of venue may be significant. Technology has advanced considerably since 2002. The robots fighting on ABC may not be as quirky and funny as the ones on Comedy Central. These robots may turn out to be closer to Terminator than Short Circuit.
ABC has reportedly ordered six episodes of the show.
Here’s a countdown of the top ten BattleBots moments to get you excited:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3zWxO3yYs
H/T Deadline | Photo by Paulolenz/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)