On consultation from my brother, I decided to download the first two episodes of the re-make of American Gladiators. When the show was on television over 15 years ago it was rather unique (for its time; remember there was no Fear Factor) and entertaining to watch. Unfortunately, this incarnation doesn’t quite do it. I had to think about it, and came with the following reasons:
The only gladiator with any personality seems to be the “Wolf Man”. While the old gladiators didn’t exactly distinguish themselves, the attempt to do so here doesn’t seem to work and they just don’t look all that scary compared to the contestants.
What’s with the music after one of the gladiators win an event? It’s kind of kookey. It reminds me a lot of The Running Man, which is not good – one thing the original did not make you think is that you were in some sort of Orwellian universe watching a gladiator show.
The camera angles are quite off – for example, does anybody have a clue what’s going on with the rings? There desperately needs to be an overhead angle lens with that event. In addition to the angles, the lighting is horrible – very frequently you would get one of the background spotlights messing around with the picture. The overall colour scheme just looks off.
What’s with the water? Are people going to drown? Are there sharks in the water? I can imagine the producers thought the water would give an extra element of danger, but instead just ended up making the set look more silly.
They royally mucked up the Assault event – in the old series, the weapons come loaded, while with this one, you have to load them up? Half the contenders couldn’t even figure out to load the cannon on the second part, and by then they’ve already used up half a minute of time. Not exciting.
The Earthquake and the Hit and Run events are quite lame. Hit and Run also has the same problem with the camera angles.
There is simply too much talk between events – they interview each contestant before and after the event which is just too much babble since they all have the same thing to say. In the old series, they just gave them their blurb before they began the action and got on with business. This, by far and away, is the biggest problem.
The way the game is structured makes the first three events completely irrelevant – as contestants would typically beat each other on the eliminator by more than a 10 second magnitude, inevitably it didn’t really matter what a contestant did prior. As long as they just made it to the eliminator without injury they would roughly stand an equal chance compared to if they didn’t make it. The optimal strategy seems to be to just take it very easy in the first events, and then save all your energy for the eliminator at the end.
The eliminator itself seems to be structured to benefit people that are light and nimble. The treadmill at the end is also a very unbalancing factor – slow people that have a disposition to the treadmill will inevitably beat fast people that can’t do the treadmill.
It was painful watching the show the second time around even with the benefit of having all the commercials ripped out – there wasn’t much content. The show clearly won’t make it past a year without significant improvement. It’s not even worth a torrent download, people.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 and is filed under Commentary.
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