Edit Wars #10

Nearly every Robot Wars fight ever filmed was edited down in some way. (I have covered some of the more glaring examples in the past.) No fight that lasted the whole 5 minutes made it to air in its entirety, with some lasting less than 2 minutes once the editor had got their hands on it; I believe the record for least cut full-length battle is the Series 6 Grand Final, which only had about 20 seconds trimmed from it. Usually, however, the edit was done well enough that it wasn't too obvious. Apart from this one.

Why is there such a horrible jump-cut? The fight is better served by being shorter, I grant you, but surely it was possible to make it look better than this? I can't think of any other edits on the show anywhere like as bad as this; usually robots don't suddenly completely change positions!

And so, another thing that has annoyed me for years is finally brought to wider attention. In a bid to try and make this post slightly more interesting, here is a first-hand account of the Panic Attack team's time filming the Seventh Wars which I found on the Internet Archive whilst attempting to find something else (I'll let you know if I do manage to find the thing in question, as it is genuinely quite interesting)... and that might have been it for this week, were it not for a quite startling revelation on the Robot Wars Wiki I was alerted to by a reader.

Here is a link to the War of Independence, a special episode broadcast over the Christmas period during Series 4, specifically the fight between Mortis and Panic Attack. According to a comment on that very video by Mortis driver Arthur Chilcott, that battle was actually fought twice, and the broadcast version is a combination of the two. The judges went for Mortis after the first fight, but there was some kind of pushback from the producers, who wanted Panic Attack to win, which resulted in the battle being fought again.

There are many questions about this. Why were the producers so dissatisfied with the result? Why was having the fight all over again - surely a time-consuming process - considered an acceptable compromise? Why was the broadcast version edited together from the two different fights? I would guess the answer to that first question might be that they wanted the War of Independence final to be a former UK champion versus the American contender, but I've no clue on the other two. (I don't find this particular example of match-fixing that concerning, given this particular show was just for fun and not part of the main competition, although it does make one look on the shenanigans in Series 7 anew.)

Also: It looks like the German broadcasts of the original series contained additional behind-the-scenes segments, with the crew fortunately speaking in English (given I'm not really prepared to learn another language just for the sake of this blog). It's great how, after all this time, the show is still throwing up these little tidbits. Remember when we all thought this series of articles would end at #4? And here we are in the double digits, still pondering newly discovered mysteries.