There’s also one with Raquel Welch. Rollerball has motorcycles but Kansas City Bomber has Raquel Welch in the Roller Derby.
I’d be interested in what she says. I had a couple of co-workers in local Roller Derby in Boston, and I met someone who does in it here in RI but didn’t know at the time. The game has grown rapidly. They seem to usually be playing on a flat track so it’s not that hard to find a venue.
I guess there could be men’s leagues but haven’t heard of any.
Did anyone else look at that image, and think it looked like something Slug Signorino would draw?
I know nothing about roller derby, so can’t offer an opinion, beyond being amused by some of the names the players used. In an episode of Bones, Angela revealed that she used to play - and her name was Smackie Kennedy.
It’s worth watching. Raquel Welch is quite good in that movie.
A friend of mine is on a roller derby team. From what I gather, it’s definitely not scripted, and it is a competition, but there’s more emphasis on having fun than on winning.
This. I knew a woman who played semi-pro roller derby on weekends. She never indicated any of it was fake. They would roughhouse a little to put on a show, but they honestly played to win.
I wasn’t implying it was fake, not scripts, choreography, or predetermined outcomes. Just showomanship.
How does the game work? What do you do to win? Race around faster than the other guys?
Yeah, at least with the teams around here, every player has a nickname they go by (almost always a pun of some kind) and some kind of personality.
Imagine if you took professional wrestling, and had the costumes and posing and characters with crazy names and everything, and then they wrestled for real. And it was all women. That seems to be modern female roller derby.
I have not had a chance to actually attend a live match but if the opportunity came up I’d check it out.
There is a more recent roller derby movie called “Whip It” with some recognizable names such as Drew Barrymore, Kristen Wiig and Elliot Page
Each team has a set of blockers (not sure how many, maybe 4) and a jammer. It’s the jammer’s job to get around the track, then start passing the other team’s skaters. For each of the other team’s skaters that the jammer passes, the team gets a point. Of course, the other team’s blockers want to prevent that. So, two teams on the track; two sets of blockers, two jammers, and plenty of mayhem.
But there are definite rules to the game. They’re nicely explained, even with diagrams, in this movie:
Here’s some video from '72.
Here’s an event from the Fifties:
Thanks. My knowledge of roller derby is limited to what I’ve learned from watching Sanford and Son.
It’s still a thing in Seattle with the Rat City Roller Derby. 10 years ago Rat City was a federation with sub-leagues like the Socket Wenches. They would “tour” a team for the federation with whoever wanted to go. Seemed like a lot of sleeping on the opponents couch kinda thing.
My niece was “Imahandful” and her girlfriend was “Kamikaze Kim” 10-ish years ago. They claimed it wasn’t staged/scripted. They all sorta knew how to play the game, but they wanted to win. imahandful “toured” all over including places in Europe.
There’s also an episode of Murdoch Mysteries called Hot Wheels of Thunder. In the “Murdochiverse”, Doctor Ogden and the Inspector create the sport of Roller Derby while investigating a death.
I don’t think it’s at all like pro wrestling. I’ve been involved with pro wrestling, and it is indeed scripted. It’s a soap opera, basically. I always knew the outcomes before the show even started. “Will the All-American defeat Bulldog McBain for the heavyweight championship? Come back next month and find out!”
But really, even though pro wrestling has so-called rules, they’re written in pencil, and can be erased when it’s convenient. Knock out the referee (who’s faking the knockout), and go to town on your opponent. With whom you’ve practiced, so neither of you gets hurt.
Returning to roller derby, and looking into it further, I don’t think that it is scripted. It is a team sport, with documented rules (I was able to find this set of rules from the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, or WFTDA). And it seems to me that getting all members of a team to take a dive (when a team is at least 5 people) is a lot harder than getting one fighter to take a dive, as in pro wrestling, where there are only two fighters.
It isn’t scripted now, but it was several decades ago. Sort of the opposite of what happened with wrestling, if you think about it.
Hasn’t pro wrestling been fake for more than a century?
More or less, but that’s beside the point.