We Who Are About to Get Wet, Salute You

We have just entered the best part of the year for sports. The bowl season just ended, giving way to the NFL playoffs. After the Super Bowl there’s about a month to watch college basketball to aid in making “smart” picks in March Madness (Go Shockers!). After March Madness, a.k.a nirvana, is the NBA playoffs, which may or may not be entertaining, depending on the level of involvement by the Pistons and Spurs. Then all we have all summer is baseball, which is right up there with competitive grass growing and hula-hoop-offs. Anytime the most exciting thing about a sport is Congressional testimony, that sport sucks. But I digress. The point of this post is that in the midst of this ½ year-long-sports-haven another sorely missed sporting event has once again cast its lot in the ring. It might not be as fun as the original, throwing Christians to lions, Roman version, but the new American Gladiators offers plenty of mindless, muscle-bound entertainment for all.
I’ve been waiting for this day for years. About 2 years ago, after months of phone calls and letters, which I never actually made or wrote but meant to, Gladiators began airing on ESPN Classic. I began sleeping better at night, knowing if I had the craving to watch grown men run around in steel balls like hamsters trying to land on buttons to release smoke, I could do so within 24 hours. Apparently I was not alone, as a month or two ago a commercial alerted me NBC saw fit to reincarnate the show and revitalize the spandex industry. I think my heart stopped for a second, then pumped irregularly until the date now engraved on my skull, January 6th, arrived.
Gladiators has been updated from the nineties' version with 21st century technology (water) and haircuts (not mullets). While it’s debatable whether these changes improve the show (I think one of the strengths of the old show was the mullet to non-mullet ratio, better than 4 to 1) All of the action that made it great before is still there. Weekend Warriors and housewives are getting decked, dropped, bruised and concussed in all the Gladiatorial events I grew to love as a kid.
This crop of Gladiators seems to be good, too. Most of them are mixed martial artists, so aside from being larger than normal humans they can actually move and know how to inflict pain. My favorites became apparent almost instantaneously. (The Big Bad) Wolf has a signature howl and is big and hairy, kinda like me. Most important, he has solid Gladiator skills, as witnessed in Pyramid, Hang Tough, Gauntlet, and, most notably, Power Ball. The pick of the litter of the ladies is obviously Crush. There was a guy in the Audience holding a sign that said, “I have a Crush on Crush.” My sign would say, “I’d Crush that!” She is the only one that looks like a woman, and she already exploded a girls head in The Joust by hitting her in the face about 50 times. I also love this quote from her in an ESPN Page 2 article: “I’m not used to training with weapons.” (Crush is 5-0 in MMA).
Some of the events do appear to have taken a step backwards. Earthquake doesn’t seem to be as good as Breakthrough and Conquer, which had a football and wrestling portion. Assault, quite possibly the best game in the original, is now too complicated (You have to find an arrow at one station to load in a gun at the next? What is this, Double Dare?!), although hurling the Gladiator backwards into water does beat smoke going off. Hang Tough has shrunk the ring field down considerably, effectively eliminating the chase component of the event. Hit and Run, a new event, is taken from Extreme Eliminator Challenge and isn’t as good without the goofy translated commentary.
And then there’s the Eliminator. All of the parts involving Gladiators have been removed, including the end where a Gladiator stood behind one of two doors for each contestant. But this version is definitely harder. It has incorporated some Japanese ideas (Hugging a huge wheel that spins the person around is from Ninja Warrior). It may be less exciting and slower, but that’s because the contestants are utterly exhausted. By the time they get to the reverse escalator at the end (previously at the beginning) some can’t even make it up. I don’t know if I like that part, because it doesn’t matter who did the best in the games or the rest of the Eliminator, but who can climb up that damn treadmill on the first try. I do appreciate the players collapsing through the finish wall rather than running, a testament to the physical toll the Eliminator charges.
So American Gladiators isn’t perfect. It still has too many commercials and interviews filled with clichés (“I just want to give it my best 110%, focus on this event and prove I have what it takes to be here…”), and maybe Hulk Hogan is getting a little old and forgot you can use sentences without saying “Brother.” But until The Coliseum reopens and men armed with tridents and short swords battle to the death, I’ll take it.