I haven't thought about this series in quite some time but it has been around for many years. I remember getting a bit bored with it in the past because the commentary that had been included in the series was boring as hell and we just wanted to get to the robot fighting! The commentary is still pretty bad but overall the show has gotten a lot better since I last saw it many years ago.
If it hadn't popped up on Netflix out of the blue I likely wouldn't have seen it ever again and I binge watched the 2 available seasons in two days.
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I will admit that I did skip a great deal of the commentary though because the people who they have doing it are hired for their personalities I guess rather than their expertise in anything mechanical because the things they say during the battles and the lead ups to it are mostly the same regurgitated stuff.
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There is some hot blonde woman who serves as the "leader" of the commentary team and she is probably the least annoying of the entire bunch. The guy in the center is the announcer of the matches and he probably annoys me the most out of everyone. It is kind of funny because Kenny Florian is an ex MMA fighter and any time that he is in the shot he is closer to the camera because I think he might be a little self-conscious about how much shorter he is than the other people.
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Things have changed a lot in this game since I last saw it as flamethrowers and welders are now part of the operations of the bots although I wouldn't say it has been much of a factor in any of the battles I saw, but it is an entertaining addition.
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Teams are also now allowed to have drones and smaller bots called "nuisance bots" that are normally flamethrowing bots as well. I wouldn't say that either of these have been a factor in any of the events that I have seen. The stuff that wins seems to be the old fashioned stuff like rotating blades and flipping mechanisms although some teams have tried to be more artistic with their creations.
I think it is easy for a lot of people to forget that this show ever existed because it only lasted a few seasons when it was first introduced back in the year 2000. It was revived in 2015 by ABC and has since been transferred to several networks before landing on Netflix. Since I don't have network TV I probably wouldn't have known it was ever revived.
Should I watch it?
I think that this show has improved a LOT since it first aired over 20 years ago and I believe that the popularity of combat sports and e-sports has a big part to do with why people are digging this again. I feel that most people will enjoy this but as you would expect from a show designed for a network there is a lot of what i consider to be unnecessary filler mixed in and therefore I recommended watching it with remote in hand. When i watched it this way, I found it very easy to binge and ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I was going to.
