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Gladiators!
Jan. 7th, 2008 05:22 pmI have about two weeks of past holiday to write about, but before I do that, I bet you'd like to hear about a bunch of sweaty men beating each other up with gigantic cotton buds first. Yesterday we watched the return of (American) Gladiators, which is a bit of 90s television that I'd sort of missed without realizing it.
Each Saturday when I was in school, we'd watch the British version with my uncle (my parents were unsurprisingly never much into it). I had only ever seen a couple of episodes of the old American version, but it was strange seeing how low-rent it was - the British one had spectacular events like swinging from a burning pendulum in Birmingham Indoor Arena and plummeting six million feet onto a crash mat if you slipped, but the American one looked rather like something filmed in a school gym as a joke. The update, though, has fixed that by being so completely overblown that it becomes hysterical - the character roster at the start was clearly thought up by someone who had played rather too much UT3. And it definitely wants to be a programme from the early nineties - it even has Hulk Hogan presenting it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything so comfortable with its own cheesiness. Apart from Hammerfall, of course.
The games were pretty much how I remembered them, though because this is American TV, the whole thing is sped up a bit. Admittedly this is probably a good thing - I remember a couple of events that went on for far too long before, and they've been shortened or livened up a bit here, with most events being different for the male and female competitors so that you don't watch the same thing four times. The amount of conversation is also minimal - each competitor has the chance to spout some ridiculous overconfident clichés before each game, but this just makes it all the more satisfying when they are inevitably minced.
The new series opened with Powerball, which was one of the games that I felt was a bit overplayed, but perhaps just because of not seeing it for fifteen years, it wasn't as bad this time. The monotony of it was also broken by the fact that one of the women bent her knee in the wrong direction shortly after it started, taking her out of the competition instantly.
Joust was another of the old games that featured (which was called Duel in Britain, with "Joust" being a different game involving bizarre rotating bucking horse-things), and was pretty much the same, though the crash mat for all games that involved falling from great heights has been replaced with a water pool - this will probably result in slightly fewer broken necks. And naturally, they weren't always put up against Shadow the boggle-eyed steroid abuser, either. I don't think I'd seen Earthquake or Hit and Run (which really should have been called Bridge of Death) before, though - involving sumo-wrestling on a shaking platform and running over a bridge while dodging hundred-pound swinging weights, Galaxy Quest-style, respectively.
And the trademark final, the Eliminator, is familiar without being the same. As far as I remember. it involves a wall climb, then a new swimming section under (and I'm not joking) a wall of fire, and a net climb while soaked and heavy. This is followed by those hand-bike things that looked totally impossible, the balance beams from near the end of the 90s version, a climb up the Pyramid, and an overhead slide back down. Finally, ropes are now provided on the new steeper Travelator (something that I have only just now learned how to spell), but after seeing the state of excruciating pain and exhaustion most competitors are in by this point, it's not difficult to see why.
To sum up, it's exactly the same muscle-bound daftness that your parents didn't want you to watch fifteen years ago, and something I'll be watching just for the memory of it all. The referee is significantly less Scottish than ours, though.
Each Saturday when I was in school, we'd watch the British version with my uncle (my parents were unsurprisingly never much into it). I had only ever seen a couple of episodes of the old American version, but it was strange seeing how low-rent it was - the British one had spectacular events like swinging from a burning pendulum in Birmingham Indoor Arena and plummeting six million feet onto a crash mat if you slipped, but the American one looked rather like something filmed in a school gym as a joke. The update, though, has fixed that by being so completely overblown that it becomes hysterical - the character roster at the start was clearly thought up by someone who had played rather too much UT3. And it definitely wants to be a programme from the early nineties - it even has Hulk Hogan presenting it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything so comfortable with its own cheesiness. Apart from Hammerfall, of course.
The games were pretty much how I remembered them, though because this is American TV, the whole thing is sped up a bit. Admittedly this is probably a good thing - I remember a couple of events that went on for far too long before, and they've been shortened or livened up a bit here, with most events being different for the male and female competitors so that you don't watch the same thing four times. The amount of conversation is also minimal - each competitor has the chance to spout some ridiculous overconfident clichés before each game, but this just makes it all the more satisfying when they are inevitably minced.
The new series opened with Powerball, which was one of the games that I felt was a bit overplayed, but perhaps just because of not seeing it for fifteen years, it wasn't as bad this time. The monotony of it was also broken by the fact that one of the women bent her knee in the wrong direction shortly after it started, taking her out of the competition instantly.
Joust was another of the old games that featured (which was called Duel in Britain, with "Joust" being a different game involving bizarre rotating bucking horse-things), and was pretty much the same, though the crash mat for all games that involved falling from great heights has been replaced with a water pool - this will probably result in slightly fewer broken necks. And naturally, they weren't always put up against Shadow the boggle-eyed steroid abuser, either. I don't think I'd seen Earthquake or Hit and Run (which really should have been called Bridge of Death) before, though - involving sumo-wrestling on a shaking platform and running over a bridge while dodging hundred-pound swinging weights, Galaxy Quest-style, respectively.
And the trademark final, the Eliminator, is familiar without being the same. As far as I remember. it involves a wall climb, then a new swimming section under (and I'm not joking) a wall of fire, and a net climb while soaked and heavy. This is followed by those hand-bike things that looked totally impossible, the balance beams from near the end of the 90s version, a climb up the Pyramid, and an overhead slide back down. Finally, ropes are now provided on the new steeper Travelator (something that I have only just now learned how to spell), but after seeing the state of excruciating pain and exhaustion most competitors are in by this point, it's not difficult to see why.
To sum up, it's exactly the same muscle-bound daftness that your parents didn't want you to watch fifteen years ago, and something I'll be watching just for the memory of it all. The referee is significantly less Scottish than ours, though.
