Edit Wars #6: International Insurrection

The year is 2000, Robot Wars is really hitting its stride, and a new video-only release, The First World Championship, offers the chance to see the best of British roboteering fight against robots from around the world. Except, erm, not really.

The First World Championship features five veterans of the English series representing, well, England: 101, Behemoth, Chaos 2, Mortis and Razer. (It's not clear what the selection criteria was for these robots, but I suspect they were the best five who were available; Hypno-Disc was reportedly down to compete, but it did not, probably because the robot was barely working after the Series 3 final.) There are also several other robots all too familiar to fans: Panic Attack representing Wales, Wel-Dor representing Northern Ireland, All Torque for Scotland and Diotoir for the Republic of Ireland are all fair enough, I suppose, but that's still another quarter of the slots taken by robots already well-known for their participation in the home series. Then things get slightly dafter, as London-based Cerberus represents Cyprus, and Oxford's Killerhurtz represents the Czech Republic on the grounds that one of its team members is half-Czech. (To be fair, the show clearly realises the ludicrousness of this last one, openly mocking the robot's tenuous connections to the country.)

That leaves five genuine non-UK robots: Depoppesaurus Rex of Belgium, Techno-Lease from Holland, Australia's Terror Australis, and two American robots, Prometheus and The Mauler. Two of these robots (Techno-Lease and Australis) literally do nothing at all in their only battles, and The Mauler is disqualified after the show's technical crew deem it too dangerous to participate in the show - this is probably down to Pussycat's earlier disqualification from the series and the ensuing tightening up of health and safety, as the team genuinely flew all the way from America to participate in the recording! The other two robots put up a slightly better fight, but still get knocked out in Round 1, meaning that by the time the competition reaches its second round we have seven robots representing various parts of the UK and Ireland and Cerberus with its questionable links to Cyprus (which only got through by default after The Mauler was disqualified).

Mauler in the 'testing area' prior to its disqualification

Perhaps the rather non-worldly World Championship received complaints, or maybe as the sport became more and more popular the opportunities to include genuine international challengers grew. In any event, the Second World Championship (recorded a year later, but broadcast on TV as part of the Extreme series) fares much better: there are four UK robots (the four semi-finalists in the concurrently filmed All-Stars championship, although this was never qualified on TV as the later stages of that tournament hadn't yet been broadcast), four American robots, two German machines, and one each from Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Northern Ireland, Belgium and South Africa.

The Second World Championship was also broadcast as part of the US series of Robot Wars, with all the commentary being redone by their commentator, Stefan Frank, and new interviews with the American hosts, Mick Foley and Rebecca Grant. The US version also includes some battle footage that wasn't seen in the UK version. There is also a third version of the first battle in the Second World Championship (confused yet?), which was broadcast as part of an episode of the German series, which was edited slightly differently (but did not include any footage not seen in the UK version) and again had different commentary, this time from the fantastically named Volker Wolf. Two other episodes which we'll talk more about shortly, the European Championship and UK vs Germany Special, were also re-edited for international markets to replace them with the appropriate country's own hosts and commentators, with interviews done at the same time. (Note that all international versions were filmed in the UK arena.)

The fourth UK series was also re-recorded to be shown in the US, but these re-edits were done months after the fact and hence cut out all interaction with the teams rather than re-filming them - the US edits of episodes originally running to 45 minutes run to just 21 minutes in their US versions (example) as a result. The Second World Championship is also notable for the most brutally edited battle in the show's history: the third melee lasted the full 5 minutes in reality, but ran to just 1:19 in the UK broadcast.

The Third World Championship also includes a diverse range of competitors, and expands it by holding a series of 'Qualifiers' as occasional special events throughout the seventh UK series. The top three performing robots from the UK series qualify for the tournament (although one of them pulls out and is not replaced - more on that here), and are joined by entries from Sri Lanka, America, South Africa, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands (several of whom also took part in the UK series thanks to a change in the rules opening it up to them, which raises the interesting question of what would have happened if they'd managed to place in the top three) and Switzerland, with robots from Canada and the Republic of Ireland also taking part in the qualifiers.

The revived series also recently hosted a "World Series", with each episode featuring four robots from the UK versus four robots from elsewhere. Unfortunately, the producers ran into a problem - virtually all of the American robots had already appeared on BattleBots, and the roboteers' exclusivity contracts with that show meant the same robots could not appear on the UK version. They still manage to find a US competitor, but only by providing the team with a pre-built 'loanerbot', previously used on one of the celebrity specials. (Diotoir also takes part, coming out of a 13-year retirement to do so, but also has to use a 'loanerbot' as the real Diotoir has spent all that time rusting away in Peter Redmond's garage.) Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, Canada and Russia are also represented by the "Rest of the World Team", so the show doesn't do too badly overall.

There were various other international events across the original run's history, several of which had to resort to similar tactics as Killerhurtz did in the First World Championship: the "Commonwealth Carnage" in Extreme 2 featured seven robots familiar to the UK series, and an Australian robot which was actually a stock robot provided by the production team being driven by two competition winners. The European Championship from the same series fares much better, with the reigning German, Belgian and Dutch champions taking part against Italian, Swiss, Swedish and of course English teams.

CONTROVERSIAL BIT

A tangent here, but quite an important (not to mention bloody long) one. The Razer vs Tornado battle in the European Championship was highly controversial, even more so than it appeared on television. The judges award the fight to Razer, but the Razer team vote 2-1 to concede the match to Tornado on the grounds that they believe Razer had actually been immobilised, the battle having ended in a stalemate with Razer being unable to fit Tornado into the pit on account of the anti-Razer frame previously seen in the Series 6 Grand Final. Captain Ian Lewis voted against conceding the match, and is not seen on screen when the other two team members announce their concession. What was also not seen on screen was the ensuing argument, with Lewis claiming that Vincent Blood should not have any say in the decision as he was not involved in building the robot, that led to the team breaking up. It was for this reason that Razer did not enter Series 7.

Many other long-standing teams would go on to retire from Series 7, and oddly many of them did so for completely different reasons; the Hypno-Disc team had family commitments, S3 could no longer afford the costs of upgrading their robot year-on-year, George Francis of Chaos 2 took a job as a technical consultant on the show which prohibited him from taking part in the competition (Kim Davies of Panic Attack did the same thing, but his robot still competed with a new driver), Diotoir were no longer backed by their sponsors because Channel 5 (the new broadcasters of the show that year) didn't broadcast in Ireland and hence the team couldn't afford the trip over, Dominator 2 discovered their robot had a broken base shortly before filming and had to pull out (so late in the day that the robot still appeared in some promotional material for the series), Stinger were no longer eligible because of the controversial new rule that all robots had to have an 'active weapon', John Reid's ambitious rebuild of Terrorhurtz turned out to be rather too ambitious and it was still in pieces when filming started, and, in an actually quite baffling mystery I'd like to investigate further if possible, the Wild Thing team seemingly fell off the face of the Earth completely after Series 6 and were never heard from again, with no reason for their disappearance ever coming to light.

The huge number of big-name competitors who did not enter put the Channel 5 series at a considerable disadvantage even before you consider the merchandising rights remained with the BBC, restricting how much money C5 could make from the show, and that they apparently couldn't schedule the show consistently for two weeks running. However, this did arguably make the series more interesting as a result, as the makeup of the later rounds was very different to the previous few years, with newcomers and long-standing competitors who'd previously been muscled out by the retirees getting a chance to shine.

Getting back on topic: There are other events such as the International League Championship, and a few one-off fights in the first Extreme series, all of which were filmed around the same time as one of the first two World Championships and largely used robots which also took part in those events. (Amusingly, Terror Australis also took part in the International League Championship but once again broke down, meaning it had to be replaced by Nemesis, Diotoir's predecessor, hurriedly stripped of its fur and repainted. This gets even better because Australis' first opponent was Diotoir itself.)

With the exception of the UK vs Germany fight in Extreme 1, in which Hypno-Disc embarrassingly lost to a robot made out of wood after splinters from the robot got stuck in its internals, every international fight or tournament in the history of the show was won by the UK. Sometimes, like the First World Championship, it seems like the producers were gunning for a UK victory; other times it's just the luck of the draw or, it must be said, the UK robots genuinely being much better. One episode that is definitely worth talking about in this regard is the UK vs Germany special, where the final battle went to the judges. It seems the judges thought the German robot, Das Gepack, had won, but were being pressured to not declare a German victory. They felt they could not in all good conscience declare the UK the winners and decided to call a draw, although the trophy was handed to the German team.

For the record other, lesser people would finish this article with a joke about Brexit. Instead, however, here's a quick guide to all the international versions of Robot Wars (not including different shows altogether such as BattleBots):

American: One non-broadcast pilot was made for MTV, circa 2000; it did not go to series and no footage of the pilot has ever surfaced (the first two battles of the UK War of Independence special were filmed during it). Two series of Robot Wars: Extreme Warriors were made between 2001-02 for TNN, and all the re-edited American versions of the UK episodes mentioned above were aired as part of these series (some episodes of later series were shown in their unedited, 45-minute form on other channels). A 6-episode series was also made for Nickelodeon in 2002, imaginatively titled Nickelodeon Robot Wars.
Dutch: Two 6-part series were made between 2001 and 2003.
German: Ran for one 5-episode series in 2002; notably, a shortage of competitors meant that only nine of the robots were actually German, with two from the Netherlands and one from Switzerland making up the numbers.