The Eve of the Wars

In January 2001, the tenth issue of Robot Wars Magazine has exciting news for robo-nutcakes everywhere:

The problem is that this planned night of programming never actually happened. Maybe the BBC lost interest in theme nights overall, maybe the fan-submitted footage they were getting wasn't good enough. But did any remnants of the planned Robot Wars Night survive?

Well... not definitely. I don't have a smoking flamethrower here or anything. But there are a few curiosities floating around from around this time that might be related.

Exhibit A: In March 2001, the BBC acquire the rights to BattleBots and air it in a primetime Monday evening slot on BBC Two whilst Robot Wars is between seasons. This doesn't appear to have been a great success, as midway through the run it gets moved to Saturday afternoons, but it is interesting as an attempt to expand the brand in such close proximity to the planned theme night.

Exhibit B is the Robot Wars Ident.

Built by Anthony Pritchard of the Behemoth team, there were a handful of idents featuring the Ident Robot for Series 3, but seemingly only one for Series 4, which introduced the Southern Annihilator:

The Ident Robot can be seen in the background in the Pits in several Series 3 and 4 episodes, mostly special ones such as the First World Championship and the Southern Annihilator itself; perhaps the recording of these specials was treated as a 'mop-up' opportunity to record stuff such as promos and these special idents? (Although the ident itself does not survive, photos exist of the Ident Robot in the arena when it was set up for the Pinball trial, further bolstering that theory.) And how likely is it that the Ident Robot was brought to Series 4 to only record a single promo? Is it possible that when the Fourth Wars was filmed in August 2000, the theme night was already in the works and they recorded idents for it that went unused?

Exhibit C, meanwhile, brings us back to the First World Championship. This was a special 70-minute episode which was originally exclusive to VHS, released in March 2000. (It also rather bizarrely got a DVD release in early 2005, long after the show had left the BBC and got cancelled, making it the only full episode of the original run released on home video!) However, some time later a TV edit was prepared, cut down to the show's usual 45-minute timeslot. This version appears to have only ever aired twice (and any off-airs do not survive): once on BBC Choice on 16 November 2001 (despite the fact it seems like they could've shown the full version if they wanted to), and once on BBC Two on 28 December 2001. The BBC Two airing was inserted in the middle of its first run of Robot Wars Extreme, but was not entirely random as the next episode up was the Second World Championship.

Is it possible that the 45-minute edit was originally planned for Robot Wars Night, and ended up going out in a slightly random slot when the idea got canned? It seems like exactly the sort of thing you'd show on such a theme night, as cheap and easy 'new' material.