By MICHELE HEWITSON
How'bout them bots? If the difficult-to-explain delights of them bots have thus far escaped your notice, don't hang about. Anyone who wants to see what happens when television goes really, really silly should tune into Prime's Battlebots on a Friday at 8 pm. We've already seen what happens when television goes really, really silly? Remember On the Mat?
Battlebots is a bit like On the Mat — it exploits our not-very-far-from-the-surface desire to watch things, or people, ram into each other. At speed. Preferably causing injury. Hence the rubberneckers at traffic accidents.
Bots entices with remote-controlled robots. And the geeks who drive them. But there's more to bots than bolts and springloaded spikes. This is doco/drama/sociological experiment. Truly. The geeks get to muse on the really big questions of our time: Do they think the winner will have the pick of women? How does sex happen between robots? These are not your average lab-variety geek: "My ultimate goal," said one, "would be world domination."
There is something gladiatorial too, in a seedy, homemade way, about pitting metal against metal, inventor against inventor.
(And if you doubt this, don't bother. You'll never get it.) It certainly has more drama than the that Tua/Lennox fight. Nobody's going to get hurt either — which means that even women are allowed to get excited and yell at the telly.
There's plenty to yell about. The bots — which have names more hopeful than descriptive: Disector (pronounced Diiisectooor!), Crusher and Vlad the Impaler — are released into a plexiglass cage. Their trainers (the guys in charge of the remote controls) stage the action from outside the cage. The crowd go crazy. A woman holds up a sign: "I love the smell of metal in the morning." Don't we all honey.
Do not underestimate the power of the bot. I've seen the future of television, and it's right here. World dominance? Why not? We've come a long way. Over on TV4, for example, on Sunday at 6.30 pm they're playing repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man, arguably the first bot show. Part man, part machine, he is a distant cousin, poorly evolved of the bots of the 21st century.
All right, so maybe the bots can't act too well either. But at least they act badly for no fee. Nor do they sweat, look silly in tights or recite lines badly from badly written scripts (see those daft wrestlers on WCW Nitro, Sky 1, Saturdays at 10 pm.)
And when bots do battle, they do it for real. There are no moral ambiguities. There's a winner and a loser: "The pure power of Grendel's spring-loaded spike proved too much for Disector." It's victory or death. Jerry Springer's talent take note.
Is it good TV? It's as thrilling as watching a couple of lawnmowers fight in the back yard. But in some parts of this country the perfect Saturday family day is spent watching people race each other around dirt tracks on modified motor mowers.
You could say it lacks a little something in the glamour department, too. Those bots are about as sophisticated as a remote-controlled version of those naff wheelbarrow planters home handy blokes are fond of whipping up in their sheds.
Bots could become the new national sport. A Kiwi version dreamed up over a couple of cans and a bolt of number 8 fencing wire? With Peter Montgomery — "the Battlebots belt is now New Zealand's belt" — calling the bouts and Rachel Hunter holding up the score cards. Please nobody tell Touchdown productions, because one other little thing about Battlebots: it's produced by Comedy Central.
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