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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."
I just wanted to say I watched Battle Bots over the summer and was pleasantly surprised at how much more energy has gone into it. Finally we get some robot gore!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Someone needs to steer the production in favor of greater emphasis on the engineering side. A format with an in-depth design & build episode per battlebot followed by the competition and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors would be an improvement and an opporytunity to promote STEM education.
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.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
1. They aren't actually even robots. They are remote-controlled.
2. Any weapon that could possibly damage a metal-armored bot is banned as it could also kill a cameraman or spectator/audiencemember.
So instead of say, a 30mm tank cannon, they carry, uh, a wedge, that might, uh, lift the enemy bot up an inch or too and then, well, it won't actually damage anything, but you might get some "points" for "aggression."
The ratings weren't that great, even during the summer. They were quite a bit lower than, say, CBS' Big Brother, which still does decent ratings after 17 seasons. Part of the reason it got renewed is that a show like this is very cheap to produce. It was filmed over a span of three days, with no need to pay writers or actors. They did have commentators and Molly McGrath did a good job as the host. BattleBots basically replaced Wipeout, which I thought was far more entertaining. At least Wipeout had the entertainment of epic fails as people fall off the obstacle course into mud, sometimes repeatedly. A lot of the damage inflicted to the robots during BattleBots wasn't even by the robots, but by the various hazards built in to the arena.
Each battle was basically like one round of a boxing match between a couple of remote controlled robots. It would have been more interesting had the robots been more durable in order to last multiple rounds and the operators been allowed to service the robots between rounds. At least it would have felt more like a boxing match between heavyweights. It also would have placed more emphasis on the ability to construct and service robots rather than simply steering the other robot into the various hazards.
It's not a bad show, but I would have preferred ABC kept Wipeout for an unscripted program in the summer. I'll probably watch it, but if I'm going to watch unscripted programming during the summer, I'd rather watch Big Brother or the Bachelorette.
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?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
And get rid of the whole pro wrestling everything's-a-grudge-match coverage. In fact, get rid of the sports commentators in the green-screen studio altogether. I know they're trying to pretend it's a real sporting event but I feel that they're losing their core audience by playing up all the tropes that engineers tend to hate.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Please, just have the fights and keep the 15 minute back stories to a minimum. I don't care about the plight of some person in their garage who's only dream is to be in a robot fight.
SOME flexibility on "tripe" nonsense
The GP used the word "trope" intentionally.
Enough of this BattleBots chitchat. I want to hear more about Family Feud!
I remembered the original, which sprang from hobbyist competitions, so I watched this. Not only did I rather quickly start fast-forwarding through all the yakity yak yak tak to get to the actual competition, but I found it terribly predictable who was going to win. Sorry, but it's all mature technology now, there are a few designs that are more or less guaranteed to win, and the only variables there seems to be are whether they were competently constructed, whether the materials used were appropriate, and to a small degreee, how well they were driven. I'd go through a whole episode in less than 15 minutes.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I'm not a sports fan. I am a retired computer programmer (does that count as an engineer?) Anyway, I wouldn't feel qualified to speak for how all computer programmers feel about this. I will say that I personally did not have any problem with them treating it like more traditional sporting events. Actually, I think it's better to have what I would call a multi-faceted presentation. Mostly, I want to know something about the builders, their philosophy, strategy, what got them in to this stuff in the first place, and to see what actually happens in the arena. But I don't mind a bit of hoopla on the side, especially since the matches themselves tend to be pretty short.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)