Robot Combat League

I was very skeptical when I first saw this advertised on Hulu Japan but decided to watch it with an open mind and since I'm a subscriber I was able to watch the entire season in a few sittings.

It's never been done before and though, yes, it could have been executed better I was glad to see a production house gutsy enough to present what could possibly become a new form of professional entertainment or sport. Of the negative reviews I read I noticed that many of of those people were expecting to see boxing Pacific Rim bots complete with professional Jaeger pilots and to them I say, "Please quit whining and go rent Transformers again while the rest of us watch real robots made with today's real technology beating each other into spare parts."

Despite it being peppered with the typical reality-series crap that passes for entertainment in the US I actually really enjoyed watching this. I hope that Smart Dog Media learned from the mistakes that were made and stay on the ball and keeping running with this series.

The lessons learned that RCL needs to address:

1) Final round should **always** go until one robot can no longer fight or is destroyed. The fight footage can be edited as necessary to meet TV airtime constraints.

2) Hire another robotics expert so Mr. Mark Setrakian isn't required to "time share" between the two teams during the 20 minute repair recesses.

3) Invest a bit more funding into the creation of the robots so they are more sturdy and have stronger skeletal infrastructure, particularly in the arms.

4) Take out the spark throwers and just show us the fight in all its bent steel ugliness AND streamline & clarify the rules so we the audience can understand how the judges are making decisions so no one can complain of a match being "rigged."

5) If they keep the same teams then the teams should be rotated between different robots. This will really highlight which teams are *skilled* and which are *lucky* enough to be assigned to the really well-designed robots.

Though these bots aren't of the caliber I'm used to seeing here in Japan RCL is highly entertaining and exciting and I'd pay to go to see these tournaments in person.

My final thoughts on this show are...

AWESOME!! Finally a new sport to Entertain the Masses! If I was back in California during season one I'd *definitely* have gone to see as many of these at the arena as I could.

*********** LET'S SEE RCL SEASON TWO!!! ***********

Have you ever been in a mood to watch mindless violence but without the blood and guts? Do you want to see fights that have no motivation whatsoever? Did you think "Scrapheap Wars" was one of the greatest TV series ever? If you do, Robot Combat League is right up your alley. Otherwise, not so much.

The robots are hydraulically driven and from the show appear to be loaded with design flaws. Two have literally fallen in half. The teams don't get to build or modify the robots - just attempt to fix them after each round. There's no intelligence on the robots. They are just driven by a team of two operators.

The show lacks action. There's too much badly hyped talk and far too little whoop ass.

Could the show make it? It would need to change its format. Get in deep, allowing the teams to customize them from more bare units and show their design trade-offs and decision making. Have victories allow each bot to add something, maybe an upgrade.

There are so many things right with the premise of this show, and so many things wrong with the execution that its hard to know where to begin.

First the contestants don't build their own robots. They are randomly assigned in the first episode. I say "random" and yet the military man who can't finish a sentence without mentioning that he flew attack helicopters and wears an Army t-shirt somehow got the green military robot. All of the robots are built by one guy, who also is the one that comes in and does the mid-round repairs, which doesn't make a lot of sense since he is one person and there are 2 robots in each fight. How do they decide which robot he goes in to repair? Second, the robots themselves don't appear to be all that different. They all have exposed mid-sections, herky jerky arms that don't seem to be capable of landing solid punches and hydraulic lines in the arms that come off on their own. We've already seen in 2 episodes that some of the worst damage done to these robots is done by their own operators when they swing the arms too fast.

Third, Chris Jericho is a funny, charismatic presence that is being totally wasted on this show. He is only used to explain the rules to the contestants while another guy does the actual commentating during the robot fights. Really anyone could be doing Jericho's role and it wouldn't be any different.

Fourth, the actual presentation of the show is just more of the same reality show garbage that we've all seen before. 90% of the show is interview vignettes with the "contestants" who are obviously meant to be B-list celebrities, except for the fact that they aren't celebrities at all. We have George Lucas' daughter, a 2 time Olympian from Jamaica, a guy that flew attack helicopters and a couple of unattractive girls who wear hot-pants and midriff baring tops to the robot fights.

So instead of watching robots fight, or even Chris Jericho try to make this show entertaining, we get to listen to these people that we don't care about tell us their opinion of everything happening around them. I think the whole hour long show had about 5 minutes of actual robots fighting, not counting all of the times they replay the exact same clip from a fight. I predict within a month Jericho will go back to the WWE, the contestants will go back to their boring lives and the robots will end up on the scrap heap.

I can see this being of value for younger viewers, but personally I found it way to "bad imitation" boxing, with "robots" that had jerky movements, that almost seem mechanical even though they use hydraulics. I wonder why they didn't put the hydraulic lines inside the metal shell of those robots, also, why there are no over pressure release valves, so the damned hoses won't burst all the time.

The hoses bursting almost seemed remote controlled to me.

I think these unnatural movements, kinda jerky, almost as if someone where pulling strings to control them, and a "as if" they where made out of cardboard, effect, comes out of a "weak" "flexing" frame inside their metal shells, making the arms movements seem "cheap" and jerky.

Some of the team members seem to have little or no understanding of both the concept, the mechanics of the robots, limitations of the robots, the controls, and the physics.

Sometimes it feels like it's scripted. Like when one team is mastering the controls, and beating the crap out of the other team, while the other team is struggling to control\understand the controls of their robot, next round, the situation is completely flipped, as if the first team suddenly forgot how to control the robots, while the second team have suddenly become experts in controlling theirs....

No, this is like Rockem Sockem, only slightly scripted and with sparks for no apparent reason, probably good for the younger audience, but utter crap to me.

Right away 5 stars are taken away because of the contestants. Another 1 star gone because of the cheesy pyro-technics.

The Robot Combat League itself is a good concept. I added 3 back because of the future potential of the series.

First thing you need to know is the robots are standardized. They are all the same frame and hydraulics. They are all built to take 'some' punishment not too much or fights would last forever. The difference is in their armors and weapons. I think the standard sub frame is a good idea but they should let the contestants design the armor and weapons.

I get the cheesy pyro, the annoying contestants, and the camera angles- they are there to keep the audience interested. You can't compare it to Robot Wars because Robot Wars got really one sided with all the robots being low to the floor machines with a high-powered drum spinning in the front. Why do think it got canceled because the robots were boring boxes; all the creative designs were tossed out for what works.

When you boil Robot Combat League down you do get rock-em sock-em robots but that was a fun game for us... then we grew up and moved to Mech- warrior and the internet. Then we grew up again and either built our own bots or went into programming. Robot Combat League needs to grow up a little and given the right rules and people it can.