Slashdot Mirror
Junkyard Wars Wants You!
Dan Messinger writes "Bring On The Junk! Junkyard Wars is looking for new contestants to compete on the 2003 series. Teams of contestants are given ten hours to build a machine to solve a specific challenge using parts they salvage from a junkyard. In contrast to previous seasons, this year we are looking for individual applicants who are skilled at putting together sophisticated machinery and not afraid of getting their hands dirty. Successful candidates will possess a strong background in engineering, fabrication and a good mechanical 'know how.' Junkyard Wars wants applications from people of all ages, races, creeds, colors, sexes, religions, and sexual orientations, as well as people with physical disabilities. We are especially interested in applications from women and/or people of color, as previous crops of contenders have been underrepresented among these groups. Lots of kids watch Junkyard Wars and we want to show them that anyone can grow up to be the world's greatest mechanic or engineer! If you think you match the description or you know of someone who does - please log onto our website and apply: you will find the application forms as well as all of the information that you need regarding applying. Application deadline is February 28, 2003."
I've been saying for years that we need more hispanic lesbians building robots on TV. Count me IN!
... as previous crops of contenders have been underrepresented among these groups.
Those groups are "underrepresented" among engineers!
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
was Cathy rogers. Rrowr!
Is is just me, or does anyone else find it strange that the teams always finish on time. Some editing tricks perhaps?
Don't you know the Slashdot audience?
Overweight all-talk do-nothing airchair warriors.
If you had some sort of porn watching or complaining challenge - then this would be the place.
How, exactly? Underrepresented relative to their proportions in the general population, or relative to their proportions with inclination/education in mechanical engineering? If the former, they are idiots. If the latter, good for them. Applying one set of demographic standards to another domain entiely is ridiculous.
I agree completely. I don't think diversity should even be an issue. ...why does it matter? If someone is qualified to be on the show, more power to them!
Heh, I'm in computer engineering at the university of waterloo. About 70% of my class is chinese... and it's great :-) I'm learning all sorts of curse words and tasty new foods.
I don't know why the asian percentage of my class is so high, but it must be 'cause they were the most qualified people that applied. It's a good rule to follow... letting the most qualified people participate. It shouldn't matter what race/age/gender/disability status they are.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
and see them fail miserably because they wasted 6 hours arguing over whether to use the MIG/MAG or TIG welding torch, or spending all the time trying to get linux to boot on their handheld so they can run some simulation calculations....
Hands dirty? The poster does realize that this is slashdot, right?
Perhaps he ment to post that they were looking for someone to bitch on the sidelines in the upcoming season...
I've always thought about that myself. They've always 'got a long way to go' with 45 minutes left, and just finish the last nail at the buzzer. A little too Hollywood in the timing, and it's consistant with every team every time.
GL
If I can contact the legless mechanic and Tina Turner, I've got myself a team!
..but wouldn't this be more suited for [H]ardOCP folk? Slashdot crowd's needs are different. Hear me out.
Create a gameshow called IT Storage Wars.
Premise: Nerds will be unleashed upon ridiculously aged hardware with a copy of putty.exe, 5 1/5 floppy disc, Linux distribution on a USB-pen, and a wrench to build enterprise-level application servers complete with clustering and a backend database.
I think this could be a winning combination.
This is probably going to become the first time in history that a snail-mail box is going to feel the wrath of the Slashdot Effect.
And yes, I'll be applying. Heh.
blog |
I hope he applies for it - this is the sort of thing he would love.
when he was a professor, his students hated him because he made them think (imagine that) and he frequently gave them assignments that were much like this show (the one I recall best was they were given a remote control car, assorted kitchen appliances, tin foil, wood, tennis balls, a 286, and some other stuff and were supposed to make a robot that would roam about a gym and retrieve various objects that were placed there. nobody completed the assignment and most didn't even try)
I told him about this show once and he was quite excited - had never seen it - I don't think he watches tv. he wanted me to tape it for him, which to me is like asking me to carve it out of stone for him - I don't even own a VCR.
Now I see that they sell VHS tapes of the show, so I guess now I know a present for him.
I agree with another poster on here that my fav part of the show was the cute brit host girl that is now on that show with Henry Rollins.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
There are basically two programmes:
Just to confuse things though, when Discovery Channel in Europe shows the programmes the use Scrapheap Challenge as the title regardless of which version the programme originally came from.
Both SHC and JW are filmed in the same place. Last series this was in the US. This series its moved back to the UK. As you say, "foreign" rubbish is imported if necessary to make people feel at home.
Am I the saddest man on
Those groups are "underrepresented" among engineers!
Yeah, tell me about it. In my engineering classes, out of about 300 students, we only had two gay guys. Two! And they were both in aerospace engineering.
It was really annoying, because anytime I needed fashion advice, I had to walk all the way to the arts buildings on the other end of campus and start asking random people in the hallways.
In my experience, there are only two kinds of people who can drink harder than engineers: mariners and gay people. I think it would be utterly terrifying to meet a gay marine engineer.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
See the Cathy Rogers interview, first question.
Obviously the show cheats enough as it is to magiclaly get this contraptions to work
The UK version (Scrapheap Challenge) doesn't always have working machines. In the last series a car tossing trebuchet collapsed in spectacular fashion on the first attempt to hurl a Mini through the air. It is also common to see teams sitting, in true British stereotype fashion, wth a cup of tea at the end of the building time, having finished half an hour early.
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
Tonight, on a very special episode of Junkyard Wars- Two guys in wheel chairs join the megalomaniacs. Can Nosher find the true beauty within them, or will he be untouched by their stoic perseverance at trying to drag a mini out of a pile of crap? Will he tear their wheelchairs apart to get the motors? Will they all cry together at the end?
Will this show suck?
Carpe Deez
While normally I would agree with you, you must notice that this show is entertainment, not some actual competitive event. They want a greater diversity of contestants because they want to appeal to a greater diversity of audiences. While I doubt that it will actually work, what is wrong for them wanting to expand their viewership?
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
And on the diversity front; yes, engineers as a group are a lot more white and male than the population and even many other professions, but that doesn't mean we don't value diversity. We just don't have much time for a 'token' anything. I hope they can find a couple of competent participants that are not white males to spice up their show, but it will flop if these people don't add something to the teams they are on.
The question I have is whether participants are paid. I would volunteer in a heartbeat if they made it worth my while, but I don't have time to just contribute my valuable time to their money making operation. I also think the concept could be a lot cooler if it wasn't so much of a race as a true engineering competition. You could still factor in time as a bonus for shorter time taken, but rushing through things rarely makes for good engineering.
You could also downplay the 'wars' part of it and mix in some footage of a wide variety of wild and weird engineering feets, projects and competitions. Highlights of the 2.70 contest from MIT would always be good for a side story. For those who don't know the reference, '2.70' is the course number for a mechnical engineering design course that features a design competition where you get a box of parts and a goal, and teams just go at it. It has been featured on some programs in the past (Scientific American is one such program AFIAK). Just a thought.
Contestants must take code snipets from Real M$ applications and make some thing that REALLY functions and DOES what they planned it to do, and it won't cost a fortune to build, and can be done in a matter of 10 hours.
- Great host(s)
- Fantastic machine builds
- Interesting team characters
- Wonderful sense of sportsmanship, that it was all in fun
- Fair play
We had these things in seasons 1-4 and to some degree in season 6 (all British imports of the renamed "Scrapheap Challenge" with Robert). But in seasons 5 and 7, each of these things have been lost.1. THE HOSTS: In the old says we had Robert Lewellyn, who was perfect. He was funny, had clever insights, and joked around with the teams. Who can forget his impersonation of a V8 engine? The show brought Cathy onscreen as a foil for him, and that worked out fine too -- they played well off each other. Then we got George Gray. Who was about 50% as fun and interesting as Robert (but still acceptable). Now they've hit rock-bottom with Tyler, who offers no ad-lib humour, no insights, nothing -- all he does is yell -- and a generic hollywood talking head chick who doesn't even have as much personality as Tyler.
2. MACHINE BUILDS: There was a time when it mattered if your machine worked or not, and if you really tried. Teams came up with brilliant designs, and there were failures, but they had to work at least a LITTLE. And teams did things that were ambitious. On one of the old British shows, a team actually built a demolition machine with a hydraulic claw. And it WORKED! Yes, they eventually had some hydraulic problems and their radiator sprung a leak, but when have we seen anything that great in the last three seasons? Nowadays we have things like "Mega Wars", where teams get two days to build an all-terrain amphibious vehicle, and in those two days, two of the teams manage to do nothing more than strip down an existing truck and hook some empty drums on for flotation in the water part of the challenge. Or we get challenges like the Hydrofoil, where the competition is a boat that can't hydrofoil vs. a boat that can't move at all. It's a disgrace.
3. TEAM CHARACTERS: The Bodgers, The Long Brothers, The Techno Teachers, even the original Orange and Yellow teams were full of interesting, likeable characters. We all loved Anne, Nosher, Dick, and the rest of the old crews. We cared about them and rooted for them.
In contrast, the teams that won the last two US seasons have had one thing in common: they're both comprised of obnoxious, cursing, unlikable jerks with no personalities. Our only hope in watching their progress through the season was that they'd lose and we wouldn't have to see them again.
Let's face it: when we're against the teams, we're against the show.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: In the old days teams would trade with each other if they needed something. Nowadays they just steal it. Back then, teams joked around and had a good time. Our kids could watch the show and learn how to be a good sport, that there was such a thing as friendly competition, that winning wasn't everything. Now the teams mock each other's failures, openly berate the experts who try to help them, jump on each other's stolen stuff and are all-around poor sports. We can't let our kids watch the show anymore. It sends them the wrong message.
5. FAIR PLAY: I don't think it's news to anyone that season 7's team won by cheating. Twice. And the last US season was "won" by a big cheat-off in the demolition final where both teams just ran their trucks into the walls because neither of them could make even their basic machines work. What a disappointment.
What can JW do now?
If you ask me, it's a simple matter to address these five issues.
1. HOSTS: Put Robert and Cathy together again. Period.
2. BUILDS: Talk to your experts before challenges. Make sure they have interesting ideas to present. Talk to your teams. Make sure everyone knows that their machines need to work. Do more creative editing if necessary. Find more good challenges. Ice racers, with 4-wheel drive, 4-wheel steering and homemade studded tires? Pipe sleds that need to travel inside big pipes and be invertable, with wheels top and bottom? Pole climbing machines? OK, my ideas aren't all gems, but that's 2 minutes' work off the top of my head. I'll bet Cathy & co. can do a lot better than I can -- or than what we've been getting lately.
3. CHARACTERS: Rather than making everyone on the team required to be a welder, pick teams that are going to be fun to watch and who demonstrate some imagination. If necessary, bring back teams from previous seasons. Why not? We liked them before. We'd like to see them again. Particularly some of the early teams, whom new viewers might have never seen at all.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: This springs from #3, but is something you can enforce too.
5. FAIR PLAY: Make the rules clear and stick to them.
Making these changes would cost the show almost nothing, and would in my opinion save the show. Longtime fans would be thrilled to see a new golden age of JW, and new fans would be won over.