BattleBots Destruct-a-thon

Off Topic Maker Matters
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Wandered through Las Vegas this week, and stopped in to see what the BattleBots Destruct-a-thon is about.
It’s about 3 things:

  • Dragging children into STEM
  • Destroying things
  • Getting BB back into the mainstream (read as : picked up by a broadcaster for “television”)

First, the background, as I understand it.
Battlebots got lost in translation when WB/Discovery merger, several strikes, and lots of yada yada yada in 2023, 2024, and 2025. This means their status as a “television show” is up in the air.
A source (kinda - this is the Internet, after all!).
Thus, several folks have banded together to limp along the concept and prove to someone…anyone that they’re still viable as an audience draw & get picked up again.
The concept of the show is fairly simple. There are several “drivers”, who, as far as I could tell, are basically actors and may or may not actually drive the bots. I mean, they have controllers, and talk like they control the beasts, but who can tell? Each bot also has their “engineer” or zookeeper in charge of getting the thing into the arena for each bout. The drivers are randomly paired with one of the bots for the battle, and there are 2 fights each, then a finale where they use “real heavyweights”.
The arena is what it always is, and they let parents pay extra to let kids copilot, by which they mean run one of the corner hammers in the final bout.
In our case, we saw Mammoth vs. Chopper, then Kraken vs. (new & improved) Tazbot, then Whiplash vs. the Slot Machine (a gag where Bill Dwyer destroys a slot machine “for every person who’s ever lost a DIME to one of those things!!!”), followed by Mammoth vs. Kraken, and then the final Witch Doctor vs. Hypershock.
It was pretty much what you expect from a nightly show. The fights aren’t scripted per se, but the shortfalls of the format are evident (pre-destroyed bots bubble-gummed back together, drivers not well-suited or practiced on the bot they’ve been paired with, cheesey schtick abounds). It was a lot of fun! And at ~$120/seat, not pricey (by Vegas standards).
Before the show they’re selling bot parts - they give away a couple of bits & baubles to youngsters (apparently 35+ is not “young enough” :frowning: ) and snacks and upgrades. We bought into the “back stage pass” and it was fun. I got to chat a second with David Rush (Team Malice) which was great (except I buckle in such situations & asked stupid questions about Hypershock having the correct wheels & tires, which, truly, amazed me! but isn’t exactly Rush’s area of expertise - he just happened to be standing next to the one that lost a wheel that night & was willing to entertain my stupid!).
Oh yea, backstage, very interesting to see! They have ~5 copies of each bot, re-built special purpose for the show to be more repairable (some by their original creators).

As we were leaving, we were asked to tell our friends, and enemies, and anyone not falling into those two groups, about the show & recommend they come sit for a spell.
I recommend it highly, especially if you have li’l’uns with the vaguest of interest in such things. I can’t say it’s a show you’ll want to go back to year after year, if it sticks around, but it’s a worthwhile evening, and might help get the BBots we know & love back on the silverscreen.
Meanwhile, go subscribe to their youtube channel & watch the FaceOffs that they’ve been posting up for your BB fix…

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I thought that their ratings on Discovery and the Science Channel had been good.

How was Vegas otherwise? Many electrons expended on YouTube and Twitter about how everything has gotten so expensive.

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I thought so, too, but I guess maybe that has no bearing once we enter the merger with WB/Discovery, actors strike, writers strike, directors strike, and all the other hulabalooing that happened. I don’t think they’re the ONLY Discovery show on uncertain ground (still).

I mean…it’s Vegas? :slight_smile: So it’s…Vegas.

I dunno about “has gotten”. In my estimation “has always been”. I honestly only spent a few hours there, especially if you subtract time sleeping, because I was just passing through. I walked the strip. Bought ice cream @ Excalibur where one lonely dude was ROCKIN the counter, but because there should have been 3 people, the line was long. It cost what ice cream costs in Vegas. Watched the fountains @ Bellagio. That cost nothing outside of having to dodge the hodgebodge of skin and disco-light tech trying to grab your wallet for a pic or 2 ( I was armed with a female accompaniest, so they mostly left us alone!). Attended BattleBots (see above). What little I saw of the casinos made me wonder if the major bitch is that people aren’t coming there to gamble like they did in the pre-FanDual/DraftKings/et.al. days because they were pretty sparse. Being a Wednesday night, the strip was navigable moreso that my past visits, and darned-near pleasant in crowd level (i.e. probably BAD for the business who need it more crowded). I only saw one of the “card slappers” (or whatever they’re called that try to hand out strip-joint adverts in card form) vs. dozens in prior visits. But I paid what I would consider “the going rate” for off-strip accommodation during non-peak no-big-event time (about $150/night out the door, if I recall correctly), and had a good time of it overall.