Extreme Deadlines

On 25 October 2001, Robot Wars Extreme: The Official Guide was published, tying in with the broadcast of, not unreasonably, Robot Wars Extreme (the first episode was broadcast on BBC Choice on the 8th, and received a terrestrial outing on BBC Two on the 26th).

Of the three Robot Wars publications aside from the Robot Wars Technical Manual, none are particularly great examples of TV tie-in books, but the one for Extreme is probably the strongest. Most notably, it learns from the similar book published for Series 4 by giving each robot two pages for its statistics, so it doesn't, for example, have to reduce a robot's previous battle history to 'Series 3: Overall winner'.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this book, and the series it accompanied. The bulk of filming for Robot Wars Extreme took place between 27 June and 1 July, 2001 at Earl's Court in London, as part of Tomorrow's World Live. However, filming fell very badly behind schedule, and a significant chunk of bouts had to be filmed alongside Series 5 from 26 August to 3 September at Elstree Studios. The book quite clearly had to be at the printers between these two filming blocks, as it is missing some key information about fights, or even whole events, which hadn't yet been filmed when it went to print. The introduction acknowledges this rather well:

All this incredible action guarantees the most extreme robot battles ever seen. Not all the competitors will live to fight another day. A robot that's scheduled to do battle might be annihilated by its archenemy in an earlier event. This makes for mega-exciting, adrenaline-fuelled viewing - but it also means that some of the listings in this book may differ from what you see on the screen.

The guidebook does offer some useful clues and corroborations as to which fights were done in which recording blocks; the Challenge Belt event is listed but does not specify who the initial holder of the Belt would be, as the event was delayed until the Elstree filming sessions. (It also lists some criteria required for challenges to be deemed valid which are not featured in the show itself -- it was originally intended that challengers would have to justify the challenge in some way.) A last-minute change to one of the competitors in Tag Team Terror is noted, as that had been done at Earl's Court. The publicity shots used for the House Robot profiles are all from Series 4 and do not feature the significant upgrades carried out before Extreme, despite the text noting all these changes (although the later Robot Wars: The Ultimate Guide, published for Series 6, uses the same images). The Armed Forces Special is not mentioned, and neither are the Middleweight and Featherweight competitions, although the Antweight Championship is, and a few other battles mostly involving international robots who had come over for the Second World Championship are also missing.

The most interesting page of the book in this regard is the list of competitors for the Mayhems:

The Mayhems were twelve three-way melees, from which there would be only one winner, who would progress to one of the two six-way Annihilator specials, where the six robots would fight until one was eliminated, then battle 2 would take place with the five survivors, and so on until only one was left standing. (The book posits that the two Annihilator champions might have fought each other to produce an ultimate champion, but it's not clear if this was ever seriously planned; such a fight did not happen, in any case.) The book stating that the competing groups are 'top secret' would be, in part, because not all of them had been filmed as it went to print, but not all of the robots billed as taking part did so.

The twelve Mayhems, in broadcast order, are as follows, with robots who were not originally scheduled to compete according to the Complete Guide highlighted in bold:

Qualifiers for Annihilator 1

Pussycat vs SMIDSY vs Sump Thing

Hypno-Disc vs Ming III vs Wheely Big Cheese

Arnold A. Terminegger vs Fluffy vs Wild Thing

Aggrobot 3 vs Killertron vs Splinter

Behemoth vs Stinger vs Thermidor 2

Cataclysmic Variabot vs Panzer Wraith vs X-Terminator

Qualifiers for Annihilator 2

Atomic 2 vs Fighting Torque vs Mousetrap

Diotoir vs Panic Attack vs Shear Khan

King B Powerworks vs The Steel Avenger vs Tornado

Gemini vs Napalm vs The Spider

Bulldog Breed 3 vs Judge Shred 2 1/2 vs Spirit of Knightmare

Comengetorix vs Disc-O-Inferno vs Velocirippa

The robots that were down to take part but seemingly had to pull out were Bigger Brother (runners-up in Series 5, so the main competition may have taken precedent), 101 (took severe damage in its Series 5 fight), Mega Morg (withdrew from another event at Earl's Court after burning out all its spare speed controllers, and replaced with Mini Morg for Series 5), Firestorm (similar to Bigger Brother), 3 Stegs to Heaven (had a disappointing appearance in the All-Stars Tournament, which was part of the Earl's Court block, and planned upgrades before Series 5), Spawn Again (reached the semi-finals of Series 5 but took severe damage against Razer), Suicidal Tendencies (forced to withdraw from Series 5 after breaking down between battles) and Plunderbird 5 (broke down before its first Tag Team Terror fight in Extreme, but was then destroyed beyond repair in Series 5).

All of the substitutes were clearly pulled from the reserves bench to compete, as most of them made their only appearances across all of Extreme and Series 5 in the Mayhems; The Spider had also fought a Wild Card Warriors battle, and Velocirippa and Fluffy also took part in Series 5, whilst Shear Khan has the dubious distinction of its Mayhem being its only televised appearance. (In the second group of Mayhems, two were won by Bulldog Breed and Atomic -- who then had to pull out of the Annihilators after suffering terminal damage in Series 5 fights filmed inbetween the two and were replaced by another robot from the same Mayhem.) You could probably go through each episode of Extreme and identify which bits were part of the first block and which were part of the second if you really wanted to, but Pussycat and Napalm significantly revised and upgraded their robots between the two shoots, which easily identifies the Pussycat-SMIDSY-Sump Thing fight as being done at Earl's Court and the Gemini-Napalm-Spider bout as coming from the Elstree filming.

One other event mentioned in the book is "The People's Challenge", a planned event where viewers would vote online for the match they most wanted to see; presumably this was still intended to happen when the book went to print, but it was cancelled when the winning match-up was Hypno-Disc vs Razer, and both teams determined a one-off, non-competition match that could have put both machines beyond repair wasn't worth it. (The original intention was for possible match-ups to be discussed on the show over the course of the series, but it's never alluded to.)

The most baffling thing of all, though, is that the book includes inaccurate details for the Antweight Championship (for robots weighing no more than 150 grams, which obviously took place in their own special arena), including one robot that had to pull out when the filming was moved and missing out two more who were added later on... but also includes a picture of one of the latter robots!