So who saw the Hulktastic two-hour season premier?
It looks like they completely rebuilt the set to accommodate some of the new events. Last year’s champions Monica and Evan are now Gladiators known as Jet and Rocket. They are still lame compared to Wolf though.
My verdict on the new events:
Vertigo - dumb
Rocketball - awesome
New Eliminator - super awesome gnarly rad
From the previews it looks like we’re going to see a revival of the Atlasphere and Skytrack, too.
I watched it! The Eliminator Round is a bitch and a half. That poor one-legged dude never stood a chance.
Rocket is the rock-climber guy, right? The new rock wall is awesome, but he will rule that game.
What?! It’s on again? When? (stupid Yahoo doesn’t have it listed.)
NBC, Monday nights at 7 central…
The new eliminator didn’t seem so different, though I’m glad they got rid of the silly barrel roll.
Rocketball is super mega awesome. I want one in my house. (though it probably means we won’t see my old favorite, swing-shot. A little too similar). Titan has never looked more like a super-hero than when flying up at the camera, arm extended, with a big smile on his face.
Vertigo looks like fun to do, but as an event it’s dumb. I always felt the same about skytrack. Fun, but not a competition.
Can’t wait for altasphere, though.
Jet must’ve really trained in the off-season. She looked ripped! And wasn’t too bad of a gladiator. Proved herself on the pyramid and powerball.
Rocket, on the other hand looked exactly the same. Was a no brainer to put him on the wall, but will he be doing any other events? :rolleyes:
Must agree with my wife: Phoenix’s flying/angel thing has got to go, but she does give Crush a run for her money. Yowsa!
Still exciting and better than Season 1, but the “c’mon one-legged guy, you can finish it” thing was shameless audience pandering which is not what American Gladiators is about.
And Wolf is still awesome.
ETA: Hot Ukranian firefighter firing a Nerf® bazooka in the wrong direction? Comic gold. (And thank God they got rid of that “dig for the arrow” thing in Gauntlet.)
Whoo! I have a new Monday night activity. Are they going to repeat the premiere sometime?
It will repeat on Friday, and you can also watch it on Hulu.
I know what I’m doing tonight instead of cleaning like I’m supposed to.
I was very disappointed when she sat her ass down at the end. She’s a firefighter, she should have more stamina than that.
Did the winners from season 1 become Gladiators as promised?
Indeed they did:
I think they made the Eliminator TOO tough. It was hard enough to begin with, now every one is practically dying by the end. And I didn’t like that they ended in water - I was worried about them slipping under even with the helpers there.
The new events are great, but I worry that Vertigo is going to be another Gladiator-tilted event like Joust. Rocketball was AWESOME.
And did Hellga get even bigger? She’s scary!
I agree. Before it was tough, but it seemed like everyone was able to finish it. Now I’m scared that I’ll watch someone drown on TV. They should change it back to them landing in the foam blocks (or in a ball pit) at the end.
I think the foam blocks were more dangerous than the water. Watching people drop six or eight feet onto their heads while being totally exhausted looked like a prescription for a neck injury. No one’s going to drown with a bunch of safety divers in the water.
I liked the new format, except Vertigo was kind of lame - they shouldn’t have any games where the key is to just practice, practice. The gladiators will just crush the contestants every time. What they should do is have like four rows of the things, and have the gladiators come from one and and the contestant has to get by, like the rings.
I agree that the eliminator looks too tough. The problem when it’s this tough is that everything leading up to the eliminator becomes irrelevant. That was already a problem last year - there was only a few times where the contestants were close enough that the .5 to 10 second lead even made a difference. Most of the time, the gap between the contestants was bigger than that. So who cares about the previous games?
What they should do with the eliminator is make it more fun to watch without making it quite so grueling. Something like the biathlon - you get to a certain point, and you sink a basket or shoot a target. Have penalties in seconds for being the futhest one away from the target or something, so even if a contestant is way behind they can get in a good shot and make up some time. Make it a combination of skill, strength, and endurance, but with a fairly reasonable chance of finishing without having to stop and try the same thing over and over again for 2 minutes.
But that’s nitpicking, because this is a pretty fun show to watch. And yeah, we thought ‘Jet’ must have worked her ass off over the summer. She looked athletic as a contestant last year, now she looks like a professional fitness model. And she was very effective as a gladiator. Good for her.
Helga is useless. She’s just a steroided-up big woman with no stamina and no agility. There’s only one event in which she’s even a factor - the gauntlet. She’s too slow for any of the others, and you could even see her run out of gas right away in the tackle game (name escapes me). So they put her behind the nerf cannon, where her size is irrelevant.
I think they run the risk of having too many gladiators. Aside from the two contestants who are now gladiators, they’ve got several other new ones. I think what they should do is make the gladiators compete with each other as well. The ones with the best winning records stay, the rest leave. Or do it American-Idol style and have the audience vote for their favorites and the bottom two have to leave each season to be replaced by the winning contestants. That’d be fun.
We watched Monday’s episode last night. (By the way, Layla needs to change her shirt in between episodes if we want to keep up the fiction that they’re not taping several episodes per day.)
This is too mild for a pitting, but did anybody else HATE HATE HATE De Day like I did? I hated the stupid spelling of her name (and why give your real full name on national TV?), her over-made-up-and-botoxed face, and the constant shots of her husband standing apart from the rest of the audience and shouting advice. The previous might have just mildly irritated me or been ignored altogether, except for her constant references to her husband being in charge and telling her what to do and being the only thing that mattered (hey, you have step-kids too, you know), and so on and so forth. I wanted to shout at her that she’s the one competing.
I’m half afraid that she went home to get beat on for losing - he looked pissed at the end.