This fight was the first time Nightmare was allowed to spin its disc in the proper direction because the organizers were finally confident enough that Nightmare wouldn’t rip a piece off of an opponent and kill someone in the audience with it. More importantly though, and not a part of the previous punchline, there’s a clip of Nightmare laying into Frenzy and flipping it over. There’s also a brief flash of Gorange, a mostly unknown lightweight who won a couple of fights back in ’99 but still wound up getting its ass kicked by an opponent armed with a chainsaw just in case you really needed some perspective on how far back you need to go for a fucking chainsaw to be an effective weapon. We see Red Scorpion being worked on by its team, a robot that retired with a 0-4 record and somehow managed to lose to Turtle Road Kill. This season kicks off with the highest resolution version of the old BattleBots logo that the editors could find and blasts straight through some of the most memorable moments in the sport’s early years. Somehow I sat through the entire taping of this goddamned production and at no point did it click that robots like Nightmare, who was sitting out front on display, were certifiably “vintage” by the literal definition of that word. 2019 is fucking weird.Ģ019 is also the 20th anniversary of BattleBots. I never thought I’d live to see the day where a commercial that ends on a cliffhanger of whether or not some angry geriatric man with a handlebar mustache can deepthroat a motorcycle gear shift would be a fleeting moment of solace to look forward to, but here we are. Occasionally I get anxious about it but then I remember it’s not really two solid hours of content I’m reviewing and picking apart, it’s really somewhere around 90 minutes because peppered throughout the entire broadcast Discovery Channel is going to try and get me to buy crap or watch American Chopper or something.
Ready or not, rain or shine, the new season of BattleBots is going to march forever onward and it’s a moot point whether I think I can handle a goddamned two-hour long episode coming at me every single week. I just did literally that in real life without realizing it as I walked over to my home office computer to start writing this article.
There’s that meme going around right now - and by mentioning it I am going to tarnish this article’s ability to be “timeless” but whatever - where people take that guy from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and make him walk up to various things while saying his line “aw shit here we go again”.