This had a chance to be really good but of course it had to be a reality show...What made Battlebots and Robot Wars special was the ingenunity necessary to create those robots, the builders were celebrated as well as the robots.
Well, the problem with your statement is that you're looking at the wrong thing. Yes, this show is not as good as Robot Wars. But, if you read "Gearheads," by Brad Stone, you'll discover that:
- The UK Robot Wars was at least as much a reality show/game show as RCL.
- The UK Robot Wars also had pit crews to help get the robots ready - and this was very necessary, as in the first season most of the robots didn't work.
Further, the robots are built by Mark Setrakian, himself a Robot Wars competitor from the earliest days of Robot Wars, and he gets quite a lot of attention.
No, the problem isn't the fact that it's a reality show - in fact, the focus should be on the people, which is where RCL has it - it's that it's a
badly put together reality show.
As Ridley Scott once said in the commentary for Gladiator, it's not what you see that matters, but what you think you see. In Robot Wars, you think you see a well-organized tournament league. But, it wasn't - it was very much a game show, where they would stop or hold up matches to fix lighting during filming, and send in pit crews to help repair robots behind the scenes. Even the robots were carefully selected by the production company - you had to submit a robot design for approval before you would be allowed to compete.
But, Robot Wars was really well put-together, so just watching it you'd never realize anything I just wrote was happening in the background. Through careful production, they created the illusion of a tournament league, and they did it so well that they outshone Battlebots - which actually
was a legitimate tournament and
not a game show - by several orders of magnitude.
Robot Combat League fails in that it has all of the elements it needs to be a really great presentation, but it just doesn't put them together properly. It's biggest problem is pacing - the illusion it needs to create is the same as Robot Wars, where you've got a boxing league with selected heats and semifinals. However, particularly when they roll the closing credits during the beginning of a fight, they don't create that illusion. The sense of time in the show being the same as time outside the show is shattered. And once those cracks show, all the others become apparent as well.
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