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ABC's 'BattleBots' Reboot Will Come Back For a Second Season (thewrap.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Good news if you're a fan of watching robots fight or just flail around in a corner. ABC has renewed BattleBots for a second season. According to The Wrap: "Following the summer ratings hit "Celebrity Family Feud," the six-episode first season of "BattleBots" earned an average of 5.4 million total viewers and a 1.7 rating among adults 18-49. Season 2 will keep the single-elimination tournament format of the first, but will double the size of the field to include expert roboticists, garage builders, families on a mission and past winners returning to defend their turf."

3 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too bad... by spiritplumber · · Score: 4, Informative

    They did do a bit of this... for example, they talked about the building of Plan X, the design and aesthetic choices, the expertise of the team and so on. Then they showed Plan X get defeated by Bronco (which got no intro whatsoever) in approximately ten seconds.

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  2. Re:Flagrantly Dull by spiritplumber · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you even see the last season? A minibot got thrown into the ceiling, a full size bot was tossed 8 feet in the air and smashed against the armors, and the fire marshalls had to be called twice.

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  3. Re:Erm by f3rret · · Score: 4, Informative

    We've had this shit in the UK for over a decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or is this some other kind of battery operated carnage?

    The show in the UK (RobotWars) was based off the original US BattleBots.

    What I find interesting is that since RobotWars ran for longer and had several of the same teams competing every year you got to see them basically find some of the best ways to win (HypnoDisc, Chaos II and Razor), interestingly enough looking at the new BattleBots it seems that almost all of the bots there either try to reinvent the wheel and come up with some stupid new gimmick like minibots, flamethrowers or other useless, stupid things; or try to mimic the big three from Robot Wars.

    Still weirds me out how many people want to make a flipper bot and go the electric route, when clearly a pneumatic flipper is far superior - admittedly far less controllable, but it will actually flip or throw robots. Like, look at this season of BattleBots, there are several flipper bots - but most are electrical flippers, so those bots tend to get into wrestling matches where they sort of lift another robot and push them around, then you have something like Bronco that basically just drives at the other robots, tackles them to the wall and fires the pneumatic flipper, sending the other bots out over the edge - I know which one I prefer.
    Kinetic spinners are as effective and fun to watch as ever, even though the BattleBots guys kinda sucked at designing them, the disc design pioneered by HypnoDisc is obviously superior to the "two hammers" design showed in this season on BattleBots, as it is less likely to get slammed to a halt, burning out the engine or basically break itself at the joints.

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