Robot Draws

At the dawn of the 21st century, Robot Wars was deemed popular enough to have its own magazine. The first incarnation, published by BBC Magazines, ran for 20 issues, covering the end of the third series and all of the fourth before being canned for generally being a bit rubbish. (There was a second incarnation attempted for the sixth series, which was published by Panini and generally quite good, but it was unfortunately a casualty of the show's erratic scheduling and move to Five, lasting for just seven issues.)

The magazine included a comic strip in every issue; these started out as 'origin stories' for the House Robots based on the programme's original publicity material (we touched on these in the review for the Robot Wars Technical Manual). However, around the time the magazine was being published, the programme was shedding its 'post-apocalyptic' aesthetic in favour of something lighter and softer, and as a result the comic was changed to 'Fantasy Fights': cartoon realisings of dream match-ups suggested by the readers. And fantastical they were indeed. So much so, in fact, that here's a blog post taking the piss out of some of the more ridiculous things in them.

Here we come across the comic's biggest problem: ludicrously exaggerating all damage. This one is particularly notable, as whatever Plunderbird 4's claw was meant to do in real life was never established, on account of the fact that it never seemed to actually work (it was listed as being secondary to 'fear, surprise and brute force'). Note that many of the first comics appeared long before the robots in question were actually seen on TV.

(It is also worth noting that this is the one and only Fantasy Fight that subsequently happened for real, and the resulting battle was unbelievably tedious and ended when one of them drove into the pit.)

I'm not sure what the robotic equivalent of 'anatomically incorrect' is, but this is it.

Another recurring problem: having robots inexplicably fly through the air. What we're seeing here is Destruct-a-Bubble somehow headbutt another robot, by managing to lift all of its wheels off the ground and have its driver somehow retain control of the machine whilst doing so.

Here we see another good example of a weapon that never worked on the TV show being impossibly overpowered in the comic. Also, the spinning disc goes from static to full speed in a split second.

This is unquestionably the stupidest thing to happen in any of the Fantasy Fights, as Stinger somehow manages to drive up Wheelosaurus' incredibly narrow shaft with such momentum that it flies halfway across the arena and lands directly in Sir Killalot's claw.

If any of the robots in the actual show had been capable of flipping two robots with such force that they smashed through every barrier of protection between the audience and the arena, I think the audience members would have been rather worried. And quite possibly rather dead.

Here, the Firestorm team have taken the curious decision to take their robot into the arena without removing its front edge safety cover and carrying cradle.

The moral of this story is that if you puncture a robot's C02 bottle, it will explode with such force that it will destroy anything in its path. The magazine also suggests that this is karmic retribution for the team spelling the word 'Razor' incorrectly in their robot's name, which seems somewhat disproportionate retribution.

Let us remind ourselves of what X-Terminator's axe actually looked like.

I think the suggestion that that would have been able to scratch the paintwork would have been generous.

And so, we come to the end of our gripping look at a not terribly good children's magazine published over 16 years ago. The one interesting thing is that they took suggestions from readers for these fights. Not only would this explain why the resulting comics were so rubbish if there was a fairly quick turnaround, this may have been the inspiration for the "People's Challenge" event in the show itself not long after (which, as noted before, did not go ahead as both robots the public chose pulled out).

Cease, or something.