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Comedy Central Cancels BattleBots
Rathian writes "Bad news for BattleBot lovers, I saw on the BattleBots Builder's Forum that CC is NOT going to film Phase 6.0 of BattleBots. You can see copies of the email from the BattleBots founders Trey & Greg at RobotCombat.com, and at Team DaVinci Robots
God willing, another network will pick it up and keep this sport alive!"
wasn't it getting kind of old anyway? check out http://www.bestinc.org for some real robot stuff.
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With the advent???? Robot Wars was around well before battle bots.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
Junkyard Wars isn't an original TLC creation. It was originally a British show called 'Scrapheap Challenge'.
And, TNN's Robot Wars did not come out before Battlebots. This was also originally a British show called 'Robot Wars'. All TNN did was take the British show and hire professional wrestlers to redub the announcing bits.
Baseball is a game.
whaaaat? Even by your rather silly and arbitrary definiton, baseeball is a sport.
You get your ass up on the mound and pitch 6 or 7 innings and see if your sweating or not.
By your definiton, a person pounding their head against a wll is participatig in a "sport".
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I've been to a battlebots show, live. Yes, fellow slashdotters. You could envy me. But you probably wouldn't want to.
It SUCKS. It takes maybe 45 minutes in between rounds to set things up, you get to see a 3 minute fight, and you don't even get to stare at the hot announcers. Plus it's not a great place to pick up chicks. No wonder it was so easy to get our robotics club tickets...
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BattleBots has it's first event in August 1999. It had 72 competitors, many of which were from the "old Robot Wars" events which finished in 1997.
Robot Wars, that you see on TNN, started int he UK in 1997, as a spinoff to the US event. It was then, and still is, an invite only TV show, designed as a kids program, where matches are made as long as the producers want, pre-arranged judges decisions or rules clarifications were not unusual, and the house bots trash bots under the direction of the producers.
The Robot Wars that were made for TNN were filmed in summer of 2001, initially, at the same time as a live show for the UK teams. This was about half way between series 3 and 4 of the Comedy central series (or events number 5 and 6 for Battlebots, having done two events before Comedy Central came along, one for ZDTV that was broadcast LIVE, and the other a PPV for direcTV that was aired around superbowl time in 2000). The second series was broadcst in January of this year.
The only thing, in fact, that the current Robot Wars has to do with the origional events that took place 1994-1997, is the trademark.
To address your second point, BattleBots has not been "cancelled" any more than Formula 1 was "cancelled" when the BBC did not renew it's contract a few years ago. The BattleBots event is run by BattleBots Inc. It is filmed by TallentWorks, and Edited/produced by first Productions, to be Presented on comedy central. TallentWorks also did the first two, pre-CC, events, so at most, the break is half-way up the chain. All that has changed, is that it will be televised on a different channel, probably with different presenters, in a different style.
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I've been to the last four Battlebots season events, and they were a lot of fun. It definitely ruins the TV show for you, because TV cannot come close to the live event. It's truly sad that they're having problems. I will miss it incredibly if they can't defibrillate it somehow.
That said, it was clear from the last event that Battle Bots is on its way out. The robots are getting stale, and the rules surrounding robot design and weaponry are too restrictive. There were few, if any, innovative robot designs this last time. Mostly the same old robots you see each season, or knockoffs of existing robots. They even had to cancel the customary rumbles which take place after the finals (and even had to cancel the last half of the last final), because they were shut down by the San Francisco FD after one of the robots started ripping holes in the battlebox and spewing metal projectiles into the audience. We were rather disappointed at the whole thing, and decided to only see the last day of competition next time (it takes a weekend for them to do all of the filming). Looks like there may not be a next time.
Seems like it will take a bit of work to resurrect the show. Not only will they need to get a new sponsor, but they'll have to spice it up somehow to get better robots. They will also need a better battlebox...