"Good grief," I hear you exclaim (I have a very powerful sense of hearing). "Edit Wars Eleven? He hasn't seriously found something else worth going on about, has he?"
Well, no, because what I'm actually going to do is go on about the show's inconsistent attitude towards reserve robots - ones which were not initially selected to compete, but were pulled from the substitutes' bench when another entry was forced to retire.
In Series 2, there were two robots which were forced to retire before running the Gauntlet: Pain in Heat E, and The Parthian Shot in Heat F, both of which did not work and were pushed back to run last before finally being timed out. (They still drove out into the arena at the start, but allegedly by being pulled along by fishing wire, a tactic the show also resorted to for one or two unreliable robots in the first series.) Despite the fact that there were reserve robots present at the filming - five of them fought in the "Reserve Rumble" at the end of the series to make sure they did make it on screen - when these robots dropped out no other robot was bought in to replace them, meaning the other five robots effectively qualified by default and arguably making the first round a complete waste of time. (Note that The Parthian Shot finally started working literally just as it was decided they had run out of time. Some robots were pulled from the substitutes bench to compete in the second series, but only in cases where the forfeiting team had pulled out before filming even started.)
In the following series, the Gauntlet and the Trials were scrapped, and the format of the main competition was made entirely combat-focused. Perhaps in response to this, reserve robots were brought in if another robot had to forfeit a place, as the only alternative was skipping a battle and letting the other robot go through by default. Here are the examples of that happening...
Series 3, Heat C: Daisy appear in Philippa Forrester's walkaround at the start of the show (1:30 in the video), but between the filming of that and their first battle, they are ruled out by "mechanical problems". Binky is pulled from the reserves to compete (6:06), but does so with enough time to film the clip of the team introducing their robot before the battle (6:36), and was the only substitute robot in Series 3 to be identified as such.
Series 3, Heat D: The Parthian Shot qualified for this series, but was again not working when it arrived at the studio and was forced to withdraw in favour of Flipper. However, this is handled in a completely different manner to Binky replacing Daisy one episode earlier: The Parthian Shot is labelled as Flipper during Philippa's walkaround, and the substitution is never addressed onscreen despite the fact that the Flipper team are obviously completely different to the group of people seen earlier. Flipper also have a pre-bout clip of the team introducing themselves and their robot.
Series 3, Heat H: Steg-O-Saw-Us was pulled from the reserves to compete,
Update! What I failed to notice at the time is that the eighth robot was actually edited out of the walkabout (they were usually all done in one take, so look closely and you can spot the edit where they should have been), and the original robot - identified as T-Wrecks - can briefly be seen in the background during Philippa's chat with the final team. This shows that they pulled out very late in the day (later than previously thought), but still no later than the above two examples.
If the robot which forfeited its place hadn't had to pull out, the course of that series would have been very different, and possibly the next two series as well; Steg-O-Saw-Us was, by a very long distance, the most successful substitute robot ever, successfully making the Grand Final of a series they had never originally meant to have fought in! It narrowly lost to Hypno-Disc in the round of 4, but the damage it managed to inflict on its opponent before it was immobilised was so severe that it was directly responsible for Hypno-Disc losing the next match, because the team did not have enough time to repair it properly and the resulting bodge-job lasted less than a minute in the series decider before the robot died.
Series 3, Heat L: Triterobot was also a substitute for an unidentified robot which pulled out, but unlike all the others it does appear with Philippa during the start; however, like Steg-O-Saw-Us, it appears there was no time for it to film a pre-fight introduction.
Perhaps the fact that all four of Series 3's last-minute substitutions were handled in different ways was a result of how deeply troubled and difficult the filming for that series was; when Onslaught broke down in Heat P of the following series (apparently between Julia Reed's introduction and the fight), there are interviews with the Onslaught team on their robot's breakdown and the V-Max team being told they are getting to compete after all. (There was a tie-in book for Series 4 profiling all the robots, and despite the fact it went to print well after the series had been filmed it profiled Onslaught and not V-Max. Possibly this was simply because Onslaught had an official photo and V-Max didn't... so maybe the producers didn't think of everything, if so.) If there were substitute robots after that, then like the Series 3 subs apart from Binky they were never acknowledged as such onscreen (barring robots which lost their first round battle, but were then reinstated after another robot was unable to carry on).
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