The Best of BattleBots Update

BattleBots Update, in its (technically) third iteration/attempt, launched in 2015 to coincide with the recently revived BattleBots on ABC. It’s been nine years already. How the fuck did this happen? It’s like when your parents tell you that you’ve grown up so fast except instead of raising a child into a productive member of society we’re talking about a stupid ass comedy blog that has outlasted pretty much all of its contemporaries. This “Web 1.0 dinosaur” as I’ve so lovingly called it has withstood the test of time and as of this post there are 197 completed articles on BattleBots Update with an estimated total word count hovering somewhere around 1.65 million. Yes, million. Even in the face of diminishing returns I kept the dream alive because I’m literally just this invested in BattleBots. There’s something wrong with my brain, I don’t know.

Today’s post is something of a tried and true form of content: the countdown. I’m sure you read the title of this article before clicking on it, it’s “The Best Of”. I wanted to use “The Least Worst” but the problem with that is I’ve already kinda been using that moniker for other things recently and naming this article the “least worst” will fuck up the naming of future articles I want to write. This is an article I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now but I also realized this is one of those special articles that you kind of can’t do again until a lot of time has passed because top 10 lists tend not to change much year to year for example. I wanted to wait until a decade had passed before doing this article but right now BattleBots World Championship VIII has been a “coming soon” thing for long enough for people to start losing hope. I think it’s time I stop the clock at nine years and do this before another year of nothing happens and further alienates everyone who’s left.

So yeah, this is a countdown list. I’ve dug through the entire history of BattleBots Update to bring you not just the top 10 moments but the top 15. I went the extra mile and, if you do the math here, I literally put in 150% effort. Take that, high school teacher who said I never put enough effort into the things I do and would never amount to anything. I wrote a million and a half words about stupid ass robots that fight on television, what have you done with your life since then? Covered up a scandal where you fucked a student or something? Probably. The criteria for making it onto this list is simply “anything that happened on, to, or because of BattleBots Update”. I realize explaining it that way makes it very vague. Whoops. After the first few points you’ll figure it out, I’m sure. You’re probably not an idiot.

Let’s get on with the show!

HONORABLE MENTION: HERE’S YOUR SIGN

Okay, actually, before we start the countdown here’s an “honorable mention”. It’s a technicality because I couldn’t pick one single thing to represent the entry so instead this one is literally “every single bullshit sign I brought to BattleBots and waved around like an idiot”. Part of the BattleBots Experience™ is cheering for and supporting the robots you are passionate about. It just so happens that 90% of the robots I brought signs for were shit like Clockwork L’Orange, a robot so bad that it didn’t even make it into the arena. I guarantee my stupid sign was the only one that robot ever got.

And that one sign was just the first of literally like three dozen. Unfortunately I no longer have most of them and the reasons for this are kind of complicated to explain but basically it boils down to “they were left with someone who was going to mail them to me but that just never happened”. I was able to keep the smaller ones though, like the “Are We There YETI?” sign that I made to cheer for Yeti in its rookie debut at World Championship II. The following year that sign was upgraded to the giant “YETI 3:16” sign that was printed off in size four fucking thousand Arial font. And we can’t forget the time I rocked “Long Live Gammatron” during the tunnel entrance for the new Gamma 9; when the episode aired on TV and the team saw the sign they reached out to me to thank me for supporting them and sent me some stickers and a shirt. There was also my Hypershock sign where “HYPE” was written in big red lettering and next to it I scrawled an approximation of the now-deleted PogChamp emote from Twitch.

Those signs were pretty unintrusive though. I want to remember the noisier ones like the time I drew the horse character from that popular video still of Words Worth with the caption “your resistance only makes my penis harder”. I should also point out Words Worth is a hentai, by the way. Oh, and that sign was for Bronco, I probably should’ve mentioned that somewhere too. I didn’t just make a drawing of the horse from that 15 year old 4chan meme on a whim. There was also “GINSU OR RIOT” plus “ginsu” written in Japanese script next to it just in case there were any international viewers wondering what the sign said. Greg Munson really liked this sign and it almost got him to put the original Ginsu into the arena for an exhibition match. The batteries were on the charger, we were that close. The signs everyone probably remembers most fondly though were the “blown up photo of a builder with red LED’s for eyes”. We made one for Ray Billings, Paul Ventimiglia, and Donald Hutson. A fourth one of Jake Ewert was later made. They were fucking everywhere the first year we had them. The cameras cut to them literally every time one of their robots were fighting even if the editors had to cut to B-roll from another fight because we didn’t have them on us at the time. I “designed” the signs but really to be completely honest with you I got the idea from the 2015 reboot season. There was a version of this sign with Chuck Pitzer’s face to cheer for Ghost Raptor, red eyes and all. We just used really fucking bright lights. (Also after a certain point the lights were turned off because they were being powered by a LiPo battery that we found literally just sitting around and it was kind of puffy. Someone from the safety crew saw that and confiscated the battery, probably for the best.)

The signage I’m personally most fond of however were the “NO DRONES” rakes that I wielded in the crowd to cheer for Hypershock in World Championship II. After seeing Hypershock’s expert takedown of an expensive drone using what had to have been a $20 fucking rake we went out and bought two similar ones from The Home Depot and dressed them up. We didn’t actually have them for the Hypershock/Warrior Clan fight – we bought them after that fight for obvious reasons – but the rakes would be at their most appropriate before the fight with the drone so through the use of “TV magic” the editors used footage of me in the stands from Hypershock’s next fight and spliced it in before the battle where The Rakening happened. I managed to cram the head of the rake into my suitcase to take home but I had to leave the pole behind so I’m sure that really confused some underpaid hotel housekeeper. It’s California though so they’ve probably seen unspeakably worse things.

Like I said I waved around probably close to 30 signs over the years and most of them have been lost to time like the really cool ones I made for Deathroll and Warhead that featured some of my trademark scalie artwork. It is what it is though. I have the photos at least.

#15: BATTLEBOTS 2019, THE JOBY EXPERIENCE

2019 was the year World Championship IV took place and this was at a time where the show was still being filmed in Long Beach, CA. This was two years into Discovery Channel’s management of the series though so it was being filmed elsewhere than where the ABC seasons were done (and I think ABC used two different places for each of their two seasons anyways). If memory serves me right this was one of the events held inside those giant decommissioned Boeing hangars that blocked out cell reception entirely so nobody could get a goddamned signal in the building and if you wanted to use your phone you had to walk your ass all the way out, make a call, and then go all the way back in. Chances are you’d miss a fight even with the long wait between battles.

But you know who did have cell reception in that building? Joby the Motherfucking Hype Man. This guy was a holdover from the ABC days however he was very much a “California only” thing because when BattleBots moved to Las Vegas he did not follow. This was the guy whose job it was to keep the crowd entertained between fights when shit like Red Devil cutting into Witch Doctor’s batteries would hold up production for nearly half a fucking hour. One of the ways Joby would get people jazzed up is by playing music over the in-house PA system. I nicknamed Joby “the man with 7 songs on his iPod” but I don’t think he actually had an iPod, he was probably just using his phone. But like clockwork every day before taping would begin he’d try to fire up the crowd by playing the first minute or so of Styx’s perennial hit “Mr. Roboto”. He’d play just enough for everyone to hear the parts where they just keep fucking saying “domo arigato mister roboto” over and over again and then when the music kicked in and they started rambling on about shit like “I have a secret, I have a secret” he’d abruptly cut the track. I genuinely have a deep hatred for that song (probably because of BattleBots) but just let the song play. It’s not like he had shit to do or whatever, he just would stop it once the band quit talking about robots.

Joby would also queue up songs as makeshift entrance themes for certain robots. Despite the robot only competing in one tournament I distinctly remember him playing Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” every time Reality would show up to fight. This might sound like an odd choice until you remember that one of the lines in the song goes “snap back to REALITY, whoops there goes gravity”. Joby would play the song right up to that point and then cut the track just like the Roboto song. When pressed for a song to play for Duck the man looked no further than Sesame Street and straight up played a recording of the “rubber duckie” song that Ernie sings on the show. He also played that popular witch doctor kids song for, you guessed it, Witch Doctor. So much has changed since 2019 that you probably can’t play the witch doctor song anymore because the chorus is probably considered racist or something. I fucking hate this world sometimes.

I started keeping track of every single song Joby played because I knew I was going to use that information to make some kind of joke I just didn’t know what it was at the time. Turns out he had slightly more than a dozen songs on his iPod; it was more like 81. At least, those were the ones I could get Shazam to identify. I complied the list into a playlist on Spotify and instructed listeners to put it on shuffle and click Next every 30-45 seconds. Half a decade later the playlist is still up and you can listen to it HERE.

#14: THE ROBOGAMES FAMOUS $5 HOT DOG

I realize Robogames is kind of a touchy subject right now but it wasn’t always this way. Robogames existed for nearly two decades before it started fucking everything up and during these “Before Times” it was a decent show. In 2017 I hosted a commentary restream of Robogames over on my Twitch channel and invited everyone who was interested in hearing my thoughts and live commentary on the competitors and fights to tune in. Naturally, I was competing for viewership with the official Robogames stream and once people started talking about me in their chatroom they apparently banned my account? I wasn’t even active in their chat, but yeah my account was banned from posting in their channel for at least a year that I am aware of. (And chances are it’s probably banned again now…)

Anyways the stream was a moderate success. Honestly I think people gravitated toward my stream because at least there was some fight commentary, I don’t recall the official Robogames livestream having hosts that year. I think there was someone doing post-fight interviews but that’s it. Like any live event featuring big ass fighting robots there are noticeable waiting periods between fights where the robots who just fought have to be disabled, loaded up, and hauled away followed by a brief sweeping of the arena and then finally the next two robots arrive, are unloaded, turned on, a control test is performed, etc. If you’re reading this article on this blog about robot combat I’m sure you are probably at least familiar in passing with all the setup hoops people have to jump through before a battle can start.

The point I’m trying to make is that there was a lot of downtime between battles. When this happened the viewers in my chat would ask me general questions about BattleBots and whatnot. One viewer asked where all the people were, referring to how sparse the audience stands looked on camera. On the spot I made up some bullshit about how they were probably all waiting in line at the concession stand in order to buy Robogames’ “famous” five dollar hot dog. I literally just pulled that out of my ass and I guess because back in the halcyon days of 2017 I was seen as some “authority figure” in the community people actually believed me. Some people sniffed out the BS but a not-insignificant portion of them actually believed Robogames served a really good hot dog at their concession stand and the hot dog also cost just five dollars. I didn’t realize the hot dog gag had become “a thing” until the following year when someone brought up the concession stand in the chatroom of the official Robogames stream and one of the moderators (a staff member who was actually at the event) chimed in and said they did not have a concession stand. This in turn led to them finding out about the mythical hot dog to which the mod responded “that’s too lux for us”.

It was truly a different time in the sport. The hot dog became an inside joke within the robot combat community and every once in a while it would crop up such as the time a couple years later when I posted a photo of one of the food trucks parked outside of BattleBots that had a banner advertising $6 hot dogs, except it was extremely obvious that the 6 was covering up a smaller number to hide a price hike. I made a remark about the economy and everyone who saw the Robogames stream immediately got the reference while everyone else expressed confusion.

The Robogames 2017 stream also spawned a character named “Sam Freddy” who was the official salesperson of the famous five dollar dog. The character was basically just me doing a falsetto while stuttering constantly and saying things like “buy one hot dog get one for regular menu price” and other non-deals. A special emoticon of a hot dog with “$5” next to it was added to my Twitch channel to commemorate the meme (the emote is still active to this day) and every once in a while someone watching the stream will invoke the spirit of Sam Freddy when there’s something to be sold.

#13: TELEFRAG’S ANTWEIGHT ANARCHY CAMEO

I’m not just some moron who sits on the sidelines engaging in the kind of embarrassing armchair engineering that seems to encompass nearly all of the social media sphere. I actually do build robots of my own and have done so since 2000. When I get into the thick of things and really start breaking down a robot piece by piece I mostly know what I’m talking about. This extra edge is something that I feel really helped this project rise up early on and keep going, despite being an abrasive shitheel I actually knew what I was talking about. I could explain the inner workings of a robot to the layperson so they might actually learn something in between laughing at shitty robots. It added a sense of know-how to this project.

One of my most successful robots is Telefrag which was built in 2017 and competed in the 150g “fairyweight” class. It scored a second place finish at its debut event. Telefrag is essentially a scaled down version of my moderately-successful-in-its-heyday beetleweight Kill Switch. Both robots were indestructible wedges with juiced up drivetrains and goddamned tank tracks. Yeah, I managed to cram rubber treads onto a robot that only weighed 150 grams. Telefrag was a solid robot with a cool name and paint job (an homage to the PC game Doom where “telefragging” involves killing an enemy by teleporting onto the place they are standing).

Anthony Murney, a robot builder from the UK, approached me when his YouTube series Antweight Anarchy was in production for its third series. This guy does some crazy fairyweight builds ranging from miniature fully functional replicas of real robots to some of the craziest and most effective and destructive bots you’ve ever seen. Antweight Anarchy was basically a love letter to Robot Wars and the robots battled it out in a teeny tiny version of the famous arena from the show. Anthony was interested in getting some more exposure for his show which had very high production values but sadly not a very big audience. BattleBots Update drew a larger crowd and I felt that we could do a collaboration of sorts and help each other out.

The deal was Antweight Anarchy would be included on BattleBots Update with its own series of articles for the first two seasons plus the upcoming third one. In exchange for doing all the articles Anthony would feature one of my robots in the show. The actual Telefrag robot fit the criteria to compete on the show but we were both a little apprehensive about sending one of my robots internationally since there have been several occasions where customs has intercepted a combat robot and proceeded to fuck everything up. Anthony’s solution was to build a replica of Telefrag that looked close to the original and use that on the show. “Telefrag AA” as it was named featured in the third season of Antweight Anarchy where it absolutely did not win any fights at all. (Anthony did not have the parts needed to give the robot a tracked drive system so his version was wheeled and the difference in power and torque was the robot’s downfall.)

You’re probably now wondering where all the articles for this show are. That’s… a complicated mess of a story. The short of it (and I’m trying to phrase this in a way that’s respectful to Anthony and everyone else who worked on Antweight Anarchy) is that the co-host of the series for all three seasons was Stephen “VoteSaxon07” McCullough. Google that name and see what comes up. Yeah, this guy is a fucking monster and when he did the things he did it pretty much destroyed Antweight Anarchy. The entire series was delisted from YouTube and I pulled all of the articles about the show from BattleBots Update. Anthony eventually cut the series down to three marathons of non-stop fights and removed all of Stephen’s hosting segments, skits, and fight commentary.

#12: HUGE HIT SUSHI THERE!

We’ve spent the first three entries on this list living in the past and I’m passively afraid that this entire article is going to wind up doing that so let’s jump ahead all the way to the most recent season, World Championship VII, where BattleBots is now hosting their show out of Las Vegas. It’s 2022 and my stardom has long since faded but a select few people still know me as “the BattleBots Update guy” and are happy to see me… and to prove to you that I am definitely not making that up in a vain attempt to make it seem like I was still relevant 7 years into the reboot era I’ll note that John Remar, the head ref, was pleased to see me. He gave me a special poker chip that had the Battlebox on it. (And, you know, Aaron Caitling the executive producer, Mike Jeffries from the Bombshell team, and Ray Billings when he visited to help the Malice team to name a few more. See I’m a cool guy, I told you.)

Las Vegas is a whole different beast compared to California. For example, prostitution is legal in Vegas. It technically isn’t in California but I’m 99% positive that you could pay a homeless person ten bucks to give you a filthy handjob so they could buy their next hit of fentanyl-laced heroin. That was a bad example, and yes I am aware this article is just turning into me shitting all over California. Who cares, it’s California. There wasn’t much to do around the area where BattleBots was being produced in Long Beach but you can’t turn a corner in Vegas without seeing a suspicious souvenir store or a showroom for the dumbest but still most impressive collections of things. (In my event report I mentioned I went to see the Omega Mart installation at Area 15. Highly recommended.)

On one of the production dark days I took an Uber to a restaurant called Neko Sushi because they had an all you can eat option that was $45 (I think) and I know for a fact I can eat forty-five dollars’ worth of sushi. I arrived and was seated and when you do the unlimited option they let you keep the menu so you can just keep ordering off of it. After about a half hour I shit you not Kenny “HUGE HIT THERE” Florian walks in with who I assume was one of his MMA buddies. Not only is Kenny dining at the same restaurant as me but the waitress seats him at the table right next to me. Here I am stuffing my face with raw fish and sitting six feet to my left is The GOAT himself.

Kenny doesn’t opt for the unlimited thing probably because he knows more than I do about staying in shape. His friend excuses himself for a few minutes and I seize the opportunity. I introduce myself and we chat for a little while. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic to meet a BattleBots fan outside of production so I’m guessing he’s used to MMA fans and stuff recognizing him and it’s not a common occurrence that someone says “hey I don’t know a fucking thing about mixed martial arts but aren’t you the guy from BattleBots”. He’d heard of BattleBots Update but only in name. That was a relief because I’ve ragged on this guy for eight fucking years straight and he just informed me that he was 100% unaware of all of it. That meant he was cool with snapping a picture with me!

Kenny’s buddy came back from the bathroom or wherever and they resumed their business, and I resumed eating so much fucking sushi that the waitress cut me off. I shit you not. Since they let me hang onto the menu to keep placing orders I decided to play a game and was using the calculator on my phone to add up the total value of everything I’d ordered. I made it to somewhere around $172 and change before I was politely asked to leave. If I was keeping track then I know they definitely were and before I could eat them into destitution like the fat piece of shit I am they were like “oh so sorry no more”.

Before I left though I got to hear Kenny specifically order the appetizer that was named “The Shit”. Awesome.

#11: A GRIP LIKE RAZER

Hope you enjoyed the brief excursion to 2022 because we’re rolling back the clock to a more reasonable time, like 2018 for example. Again. The same year I bought an undervalued taco from Charles Guan I also got to finally meet Ian Lewis and Simon Scott, the guys behind Warhead but more importantly fucking Razer. Warhead was their pride and joy and it debuted in the fifth season of BattleBots way back in the Comedy Central days. It turned a lot of heads with how destructive – and beautiful – it was, but ultimately that would be the final season for 12 years and Warhead sat in a box for over a decade waiting for the opportunity to strike again. The Warhead that returned to BattleBots in 2015 was literally the same exact one that competed all those years ago (the only difference I’m aware of is that the gasoline-powered weapon engine was replaced with an electric one for reliability reasons). I guess there was another difference: the giant goofy-ass dinosaur head. How could I have forgotten about that?

I missed the Warhead guys in 2016, but I still took a poster from their pit table. They were selling them for five bucks so I rolled one up and stuck it in Warhead’s nose for them to find later. In 2018 though I got to meet them and it was incredible. They’re just regular guys and you wouldn’t know they were mechanical geniuses unless you watched Robot Wars. I talked to Ian a lot about the design of the T-rex head because I thought it was cool, but the coolest part happened right after I introduced myself and shook Ian’s hand. “You have a grip like Razer,” he said. This next part didn’t happen but I’m just saying if I was a different kind of person with really bizarre predilections I definitely would’ve popped a boner at that compliment.

Man, that kind of remark coming from the guy who fucking built Razer. Wow. I laughed (and probably almost certainly blushed god damn it GOD DAMN IT) and Ian then went on to say “I think you hurt my hand, if we lose our next match I’m blaming it on you”. That next fight wound up being the one against what was left of the total piece of shit called Warrior Dragon (I’m so glad they retired that thing). Warhead actually won this fight but this was the one where its iconic spinning dome cracked completely in half so the outlook beyond this point was grim. Warhead moved on to face Whiplash in its final qualifier and lost. Warhead technically did well enough to qualify for the main tournament but the team elected not to advance into the Round of 16 because all they had to fight with was the dino head and without Warhead’s signature weapon they did not see a path to the championship.

The moral of this story is never shake my hand.

#10: BBU ENDORSES SPINNING MAYHEM

Let me tell you a story about a guy I once knew named Richard Riley. I fancy myself a very knowledgeable person when it comes to all things BattleBots. This guy took it to a whole new level. I swear he had the entire BattleBots fan wiki memorized front to back. Richard and I actually crossed paths an extremely long time ago, way before the BattleBots revival in 2015, when he hosted a Robot Arena 2 tournament on his YouTube channel. In a previous life I was well known as a modder of that game and my AI robot pack “The RFS AI Pack” was at one point the most downloaded mod in the history of the game. At the height of that pack’s popularity Richard made tournament brackets filled with all of the heavyweights from my AI mod and then let them battle each other as computer-controlled fighters. Richard provided commentary on the fights as they happened. I watched the whole series and finally commented on the last video where Tha Thumperizer, which was based off of a real robot I had made, won the whole shebang.

We would later cross paths when BattleBots got rolling again and we bonded over a mutual love of the cartoon Tiny Toons Adventures. I’d also tune into his occasional Twitch streams and watch him stumble through the puzzles in games like The Talos Principle. In January 2021 Richard purchased former BattleBots competitor Spinning Mayhem for $500 and got to work restoring it to working condition with updated parts. It was his dream to compete in the big leagues and this fixer-upper of a robot was his ticket in. I offered to support Spinning Mayhem 2 during its application to World Championship VI and I filmed a video for him to include with his submission. Despite my notoriety in the BattleBots community up to that point I’d never officially endorsed an applicant. I had this weird thing about wanting to remain impartial or something, but I was willing to suspend that for Richard because he was my friend.

And then… Richard passed away. He’d dealt with health problems literally his entire life, but toward the end of 2021 he became very ill. He spent a lot of time in the hospital and me and everyone else only got periodic updates from his mom on Facebook. For a while in December it seemed like Richard was starting to do better however on Christmas Day she posted to say Richard had passed away. I can’t even imagine the heartbreak. On Christmas. I sent Richard a get well soon card and in it I drew a really nice picture of Fifi La Fume from Tiny Toons, I colored it with my Prismacolors and everything. The card didn’t make it to him in time. He never got to see it. My final words never made it to him.

When Richard was alive he wanted nothing more than for there to be a revival of Tiny Toons. He ran a popular Facebook group about it and everything. In September 2023 that finally happened and he didn’t live long enough to see it. It’s not fucking fair. It isn’t. I hate this. I couldn’t make it through the first episode of the reboot, it just didn’t feel right. I genuinely broke down. He would’ve loved it.

I know this entry is a downer but it’s here for what it represents to me. I used my swing to endorse an applicant to BattleBots which I thought was really cool. The original video I recorded back in 2021 has been made public on YouTube and you can watch it HERE.

#9: THE AUTOGRAPHED GAME BOY ADVANCE GAME

We all know about “the Gamecube prototype”. Stick around and you just might see it pop up later in this article. When it came to video games that were actually released however BattleBots kind of comes up dry. There’s a grand total of one game. Yes, one. I know some of you are about to bring up my Facebook page and “UM ACKSHUALLY” me in the comments because there are two Game Boy Advance games… but they’re literally the same fucking game. Beyond the Battlebox came first and the following year the publisher dropped Design and Destroy. The second game was almost certainly a ploy to drum up sales from buyer confusion because a much more successful (and better) game had released earlier that year, Robot Arena 2: Design and Destroy. There’s no actual proof that that’s why the game was reissued with that suspiciously similar name but come on what other explanation is there?

I bought Beyond the Battlebox when it came out and I was mostly just kind of “whatever” about it. It wasn’t a good game but then again neither were the Robot Wars games so it was just par for the course. I never get rid of anything though and in 2019 I brought my game cartridge with me so I could get both Trey Roski and Greg Munson to autograph it. I did not tell them that the next step in this process was to list it on eBay for an exorbitant amount of money and then immediately accept the first low ball offer sent my way. (Just kidding.)

Both of them were more than happy to sign the game but the amusing part is how opposite their reactions were to seeing it. Greg knew the game fucking sucked ass and he even said as much when I showed it to him. We had a good laugh and he signed his name on it and eventually I tracked down Trey toward the end of the production to have him sign it too. Trey seemed bewildered that I still had a copy of this old thing. I can tell he knows nothing about video games because he asked if I still had “the player” for the game. I swear to god this guy probably called Nintendo games “tapes” back in the day. Trey was happy to see the game because to him I think it meant that people were still keeping the dream alive. Greg was like “it’s cool that you have this but what the hell man”. Both reactions were genuine and I do cherish the experience.

The autographed cartridge went into a shadowbox that I made specifically to show off my boxed copy of the game, however there’s actually two cartridges in the case because Trey and Greg signed the back of the cartridge so I needed to have another copy of the game mounted in there facing outward so you could see the label. Whoops. A picture was taken of Trey and I after he signed the game and it made the rounds on social media. It is now featured on Trey’s page on the BattleBots fan wiki.

#8: BATTLEBOTS BINGO

Every time I attended the production of a season of BattleBots I was there for the entire damn thing. We’re talking two straight weeks (on average) of non-stop robot carnage. Don’t get me wrong I love everything about it but after a certain point things start to kind of blend together and congeal. “Boring” is not the word I want to use here. Maybe “samey” is the word I’m thinking of? Jesus, I’m a professional writer (heh) and this is stumping me. I think you get the sentiment, though. You sit in the stands all day for 14 days straight multiple times over the years. You start inventing ways to pass the time and gamify the experience. Enter BattleBots Bingo.

Me and a friend who knows more about programming than I do compiled an exhaustive list of all the possible things that might happen during a given taping of BattleBots. I’m talking really common things like “battery fire” but also a few bot-specific ones such as “Hypershock starts smoking” to really mix things up. I think in total we got close to 50 or 60 and then dropped them into this program that spit out randomized 5×5 bingo cards so no two cards were identical. Oh, and the center square? The one usually marked “FREE” on pretty much every standard bingo card ever made? On our cards that space was “Joby says EVERYBODY ON YOUR FEET” so yeah that was basically a free space because that guy would shout that into his microphone at least fifteen times over the course of one taping session.

We printed off over a hundred bingo cards and brought some dabbers with us to the show and a few people started asking us what we were doing since we were four random people just sitting there with clipboards and fucking bingo dabbers. When we showed them our bingo cards their responses were unanimous: “that’s hilarious can I have one to play along too”. Eventually word got to the people running security that there were people playing bingo and sure enough those “people” turned out to be “those guys who keep buying the all access VIP passes every year”. The security team also asked us for bingo cards by the way and since we would see them throughout the course of the production one of them asked what they would receive if they won. I just so happened to be giving out packs of BattleBots Update stickers so that’s what I handed out.

I also gave stickers to the people who didn’t get a bingo though, just because I’m that kind of guy.

#7: I CAN FIND $3,000 IN YOUR HOME

As BattleBots entered its second season on ABC in 2016 one of the biggest gripes people had was how little the channel did to actually promote the show. For those of you who don’t know ABC is part of The Walt Disney Company, all the shit on that channel is. (That’s why when ABC pulled the plug after this season the entire community was terrified because one thing Disney absolutely loves to do is obtain the rights to things, do one thing with it, the project “flops” or doesn’t meet their ridiculously high internal metrics for success, and then they proceed to sit on the property and never ever use it again nor sell it off to someone else.)

We collectively felt like ABC was setting BattleBots up for failure because at the time if you went to ABC’s website and clicked on the “Shows” tab you would literally have to scroll down several page lengths of rows and rows of cover images just to get to BattleBots. Mind you, this was when BattleBots was actively being produced and new episodes were airing on ABC. They had it stuffed this far down the page. There were tons of “the usual suspects” of trashy reality shows and those absolutely stupid cookie cutter “person with maybe a slight modicum of talent performs in front of a panel of three or more ‘celebrity’ judges who are all at least 12 years past their prime” series listed in front of BattleBots but the one thing we all started noticing were shows that belonged to a side channel(?) called ABCd which stood for ABC Digital.

These weren’t even actual fucking television shows, they were glorified low budget YouTube series being advertised on the same page as fucking BattleBots and a lot of them were much higher up on the page. This frustration led me to write the instant hit article “ABC’s Shows More Popular Than BattleBots” where I selected five shows from the ABCd lineup, watched them, and then absolutely ripped them to shreds. The most notable show was the final one in the list, I Can Find $3,000 In Your Home. The first episode of this “show” boasted an impressive 12 views at the time I wrote my article. No, you are not reading that number wrong nor did I make a typo. That is “12” as in “fucking twelve views are you fucking for real right now”. The show was hosted by Linda Lightman who claimed to be a self-made millionaire who earned her fortune reselling trash on eBay. The premise of the show is that she would go to peoples’ homes and do a reverse version of American Pickers or Pawn Stars; Linda would collect a few dozen random things from inside the house, claim it was worth $3,000 or more, and then just kinda fuck off under the assumption that the people would go sell it on eBay like she did or something? That part was never clear.

The episode of the show I chose to profile featured a black woman whom I will politely describe as “very excitable”. The expression she made in the video thumbnail was used in the obligatory joke picture that capped off the bottom of every BattleBots Update article at the time and in turn this propelled this woman into meme status within the community for a brief period.

After just a couple of years all of the shows hosted by ABCd were delisted and it appears that the channel itself has closed down. The only traces of ABCd’s existence that I can find are a five second upload of the production logo on a channel that I’m just going to flat out assume is run by an autistic person and a 90 second trailer for the show All My Gay Friends Are Getting Married (which was also profiled in the article). The first episodes of the five shows I wrote about are mirrored on the BattleBots Update YouTube channel but they are unlisted videos and the only way to view them is from the article as I saved them locally to prevent the article eventually suffering from web rot.

#6: REPPING THE HUSTLE

One of the keystones of the robot combat community is merch. I’m mostly talking team apparel and stickers but this also includes other things that fans collect such as battle-worn parts of the robots themselves and the series of custom poker chips that most teams participated in having made to commemorate BattleBots moving production to Las Vegas. If you went to a taping of the show and met any of the builders chances are you’d at least have gotten a free sticker from them because those were always being handed out. If you couldn’t make it out to California or Nevada in person however most teams had an online store where you could buy stuff from them to show your support. I never became an actual competitor on the show but this blog did reach a level of popularity where merch was something I considered doing.

If I wanted to do merch though I’d have to be careful because I was already walking a very fine line naming this fan site “BattleBots Update” and invoking the name of the actual show and company. My way around this was to abbreviate the logo to just “BBU” using the same color palette and typeface and then putting that logo onto things like stickers and shirts and what have you. Unlike a lot of teams I didn’t order stock of my merch ahead of time and then fulfill orders myself, I just partnered with Redbubble and let them absolutely fuck me on sales commissions. I was okay with that though because this blog hasn’t really ever been about “the money” to me. I just wanted people to have the option of getting a BBU shirt if they really wanted one.

One person in particular was really keen on getting me to make merch available. That person was Aaron Caitling. I get the feeling most of you probably know who this guy is; you definitely do if you read the credits at the end of every episode of the show. He’s the executive producer. This whole reboot is literally this man’s doing. (I realize that’s pigeonholing and excluding everyone else at Whalerock but just work with me here I’m writing a comedy article not talking about the granularity of how a goddamned TV show is made.) Aaron was one of the first authority figures involved with the 2015 reboot to reach out to me and compliment my work on The Update. He’s read every single article, even the bad ones. He’s a great guy and I’m truly honored to call him a friend. We all owe him a great many thanks for having the connections and resources to work with Trey & Greg to get BattleBots back on the air.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Aaron and as soon as I made shirts available he bought one. Specifically he bought a “BBU” logo tee in blue. He was my first customer. Not only that but he wore this shirt on the very first day of production for several seasons of the show. I don’t know if it was some kind of good luck charm or what but that was a big honor to me. It’s always a good feeling when the people who make the content that a fandom revolves around acknowledge the content creators who take part in it. It’s even better when they drop a “keep up the good work”. This was something else though. BattleBots is a special thing and the affirmations have been incredible.

#5: THE DANBY CURSE

“Hey, I’ll be rooting for you out there.”

“Oh fuck off, I read your shit.”

I’m pretty sure this was the actual first interaction I had with Craig Danby in person. I ran into him in the pits just before the big meeting where Greg Munson and John Remar get everyone together to get them all on the same page on how things will operate just before production starts. Craig was sitting on a couch next to an obnoxiously large inflatable unicorn that the Rainbow team had brought with them and I said “hey”. Craig had brought Predator to BattleBots that year and we all know how that worked out. This was around the time that the Robot Wars reboot was happening in the UK so I’d already lambasted his heavyweight robot Foxic prior to him arriving at BattleBots.

There was a jovial atmosphere in our exchange of words though. Despite what Craig said he was grinning the whole time and we both laughed. Yeah, he read the articles and he definitely saw what I said about Foxic and I think to a degree he had a sense of frustrated agreement with the posts. We got to talking a little bit and I gave him a couple of stickers before one of the production staff let us know that the drivers’ meeting was about to happen and we should get back to our seats. I later found out through a picture that Craig sent me that he slapped one of the BBU logo stickers right on Predator’s ass on the robot’s underside. This made him the only builder to participate in a televised battle with a robot that featured a sticker with the logo of this website, you just never saw it. (The Black Dragon team put one of my Kenny Florian “HUGE HIT THERE” stickers on their robot’s drum for an exhibition match but the footage from this fight was never released. One of the camera operators got a great close-up of the sticker though and then there was a jump cut in the live feed to Kenny who was laughing his ass off after seeing the sticker.)

Craig became a friend of mine over time and he’s always been an ardent supporter of this blog and what I do. We met up again in 2022 at the Robotica event that was held in Houston, Texas because he had brought Slammo to fight with and I was emceeing the insect weight arena. Craig told me he hung around my side of the venue because I had a good personality and presence as a fight announcer and commentator. 2022 was also after that period where I went through my mental health struggles and we talked about that for a little while. Craig was nothing but supportive but he was also straight with me and I appreciate that about him.

Craig, your robots might be hot garbage (only when a camera is pointed at them), but you’re one of “the real ones” and I’m glad to call you a friend.

#4: “THE FUNNIEST SHIT EVER”

A couple entries ago I mentioned how Aaron the executive producer reached out to me and said he loved The Update. He wasn’t the only authority figure from BattleBots to share that sentiment with me. I cannot remember if Aaron was the first, though. This was eight years ago and things are hazy. Greg Munson, co-founder of BattleBots, also contacted me toward the end of my coverage of the 2015 reboot season and said he couldn’t get enough of the humor of the site. He told me, and I’m quoting Greg here, “[BattleBots Update] is the funniest shit ever”. Before I could respond and tell him how much that meant to me he invited me out to attend the upcoming 2016 season completely on the house. So yeah, that was definitely a big deal.

I’ve already talked about Greg a little bit in this article back in the entry where I had him sign my copy of the Game Boy Advance game. He’s very forthcoming with his opinions on things, he’ll tell you like it is even if the opinion isn’t completely positive. Case in point, when I had him sign the game he laughed and mentioned that it wasn’t very good. This is a fucking video game based off of a property that I assume he maintains some kind of majority ownership in and he’s over here laughing at it and saying “yeah it kinda sucked”. I like that he’s honest about whatever it is you ask him about. His counterpart Trey likes to try and smooth things over where he can. Again going back to the thing with the autographed game Trey may have thought to himself that the game was absolute shit but his response was more bewilderment at someone still having the game in the first place. I guess in a weird way that was Trey’s version of the “spirited performance” euphemism we all laughed at nine years ago.

Greg was always eager to see me at production even though he was always very busy and always had somewhere he needed to be. I don’t think I ever really figured out Trey & Greg’s dynamic during the production of a given season of BattleBots but I think Greg is the “runner” who goes out there and gets things done. If someone’s immediately needed for something he goes and gets them. Trey is the safety guy who supervises every fight and separates stuck robots and cleans up battery fires. That sounds correct.

#3: SAVING METAL BREAKDOWN & THE GAMECUBE PROTOTYPE

“Lost media” is a concept that is very personal to me. The process of identifying and searching for lost media has been gaining popularity online for several years now but the short of it is something becomes “lost” when no known copies of it exist or are available to the public. I can actually pull a good example of this from this very article: I Can Find $3,000 In Your Home. That show absolutely does not exist online anymore. Anywhere. You can find pages for it on services that once hosted all of its episodes but those pages are now either empty or return a 404 error. The service that produced and provided the episodes of that show and all of the other ones from that article (ABCd) ceased to exist years ago. Me saving the first episode of that show and mirroring it on my own channel is the only thing that has prevented it from becoming completely lost. It is now what’s known as “partially lost” and because this isn’t a children’s TV show or a scary Japanese PSA I can guarantee absolutely no one will give a shit about this show being gone.

BattleBots is not without its own potentially lost media though and I’ve been involved with two significant cases of saving some very important things from this show’s history. Back in 2018 me and a friend spearheaded a search to find and preserve a copy of the educational computer game NanoQuest. We dug up everything we could on the developer and who released it and ran into dead ends at every turn but eventually we found this fucking game and immediately uploaded it to the Internet Archive to preserve it. Nobody actually cares about this game but it was important to me and that’s all that matters in the end. After a successful resolution involving NanoQuest I turned my sights to saving other seemingly random things from oblivion. This included stuff like the full cut of the theme to the game White Chamber (which itself was partially lost at the time), the entire “AV Kids” 1986 EP from Japanese video remix group Radical TV (which is now on Spotify via the group’s original label), and the PC title Trax: The Robot Wars.

Then I remembered BattleBots had a game you could play on the Comedy Central website. There was a little button for it on the show’s official page, I remembered it clearly. Metal Breakdown was its name. The game was made some time around 2001 and it was a 3D game that ran in Macromedia Shockwave which for the time probably was not cheap to produce. The Internet Archive did not have this file saved (or so I thought) and there was another issue I found while digging through old archives of the website’s code. Hitting the page for Metal Breakdown did not actually load the game directly. Instead what happened is the page contained a very small Shockwave Director file that validated the domain you were loading the game from and if it was “comedycentral.com” it would then fetch a second file which contained the actual game.

Over 20 years had passed since this game was made and we still do not have a program that can decompile a Director file. This is because Shockwave files were written in a 100% proprietary language called Lingo and there is nothing out there that can interpret it other than the Shockwave program itself. This was a massive road block to me and it pissed me off to not end. All I needed was the fucking file name that the validation script would load up when it passed the domain check. I was so desperate I just started guessing file names not even knowing if Internet Archive would have these secondary files in the first place. Eventually I guessed “battlebots.dcr” and as luck would have it that was the actual game. I feel stupid saying this but “battlebots” was not the first thing I tried when it very obviously should’ve been. I was able to rip the game and preserve it through the Flashpoint archival project where you can play it today if you want.

I also built a copy of the old page for BattleBots from the Comedy Central website here on BattleBots Update. I created brand new assets in the style of the 2002 era ones but made the information and content on them reference the present seasons of the show. You could actually play Metal Breakdown on the page I made but because Shockwave had been deprecated across all major browsers you’d have to use some obscure fork of Firefox that still enabled Flash and shit like that. The replica page was more or less just a cool thing I made to show off my handiwork, Flashpoint is the intended way to play this game.

December 2021 was a busy time for me because as people were flocking to the Metal Breakdown page to check it out I posted a cryptic meme to the BattleBots Update Facebook page hinting that had more lost media up my sleeve. On Christmas Day I posted a video to YouTube that was essentially several hours of me playing the canceled BattleBots Gamecube game. At the time that video was recorded I wasn’t allowed to release the copy of the prototype that I had so the video wound up being as long as it is because I looked at every single thing there was to see so it would be documented. Not long after the video went up a couple of articles on small-time Nintendo blogs were posted talking about how the prototype had been discovered. The creator of the YouTube series Lost Legends reached out to me and asked if he could use my footage (I said yes).

After a few months of attention I eventually got the green light from Greg Munson to share the prototype with Internet Archive. For the first time in over 20 years this once lost game that existed only in stories of secondhand accounts was now out there for everyone to play. It was a very big deal and if there’s one thing that this website gets remembered for I want it to be the fact that I was able to get the okay to get this prototype released to the world. Two decades ago I wanted nothing more than to play this game because it just looked so fucking cool. I remember checking the BattleBots website constantly for updates on it and was let down time and time again each time it was delayed. Then Comedy Central canceled the show… and the game quietly disappeared. I had my five dollar preorder for this game at the local GameStop for years hoping it would someday get released. It never did. I think I eventually just migrated the money I’d put down on BattleBots onto The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. I literally had the preorder in the system that fucking long.

#2: “DON’T FUCK IT UP!”

World Championship II was the first season of the show that me and the people I traveled with ever attended. We were new. We were anxious. We were also very, very starstruck. Obviously I’d never been to a BattleBots show before and this was an absolute dream come true but at the same time I was kind of doing that thing where I was finding myself a little too nervous to actually talk to anyone. In hindsight this is weird because prior to starting BattleBots Update I spent several years doing stand-up comedy tours at conventions and often times I would run into the B to C tier celebrities that would make appearances there in the green room or something. Talking to fucking Kevin Sorbo? Not a problem. Talking to the guy who won BattleBots last year? Somehow that’s a problem.

The difference between me talking to Hercules and being at BattleBots is that Hercules doesn’t know who the fuck I am but pretty much half of the teams at that year’s BattleBots show knew about this website. For the first couple of days I don’t think we actually had the nerve to talk to anyone until one day during an extended break we all went out to peruse the food trucks and found Ray Billings ordering a slice of pizza from what I swear to god was a decommissioned ice cream truck. We’d been there like two days and approached no one, Ray was going to be the guy. We introduced ourselves and Ray immediately knew who I was because in a prior iteration of BattleBots Update, which was far worse than this one, I kind of ragged on him a little too hard. He was a good sport about it though and the 2015 revamp of the website had a different tone and feel to it. Ray was happy to see me. We all chatted for a bit until the guy inside the food truck handed Ray a paper tray with a slice of pizza in it.

Ray took his greasy food truck pizza and we parted ways but as Ray was almost out of earshot one of the guys I was with called out to him, referring to Tombstone’s upcoming battle, “don’t fuck it up”. Ray turned around and flashed us a thumbs up and then kept walking. The guy who said “don’t fuck it up” immediately regretted it because he probably felt like an idiot for doing that.

As it turns out Tombstone would most certainly not “fuck it up” because it claimed the Giant Nut that year. World Championship III was a different story however because even though Tombstone was absolutely killing it that year it met an untimely fate at the hands of Bombshell who got revenge for its loss in the championship finals the previous season. It was Bombshell’s only actual win that whole fucking year. It returned specifically to ruin Tombstone’s chances of doubling down and took it out of the tournament. Earlier in the day I’d purchased a few of the big 11×18 team photos from the souvenir stand and one of the production assistants said she’d ask the teams to sign them for me so we could go back to our seats and not miss any of the show.

As production came to a close that night the assistant found us wandering around and handed me the half dozen or so posters I’d bought earlier in the day. All of them had been signed, some of them with amusing sentiments on them because I guess the assistant told them who the posters were for. Tombstone’s team photo was on the bottom of the stack and when I got to it I immediately burst into laughter.

“To Andre, Sorry I fucked it up! – Ray”

I was so floored by the callback that when it came time to write the fight recap for Tombstone/Bombshell I actually just posted a full resolution photo of the autographed poster.

#1: SABERTOOTH CAT

I’ve just rattled off 14 high points in this website’s history but if I had to pick one singular thing to crown the whole blog I have to go with what is ostensibly the very first “meme” BattleBots Update produced: “Sabertooth Cat”.

The audience that reads this website has gone through at least three generations that I’m aware of so chances are most of you don’t even know what this one is. This joke started in literally the second fucking post I ever made to this website way back in the fall of 2015. BattleBots veteran Chuck Pitzer returned to the series with a brand new heavyweight competitor, Ghost Raptor. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It was a very complex build for something made in 2015; the robot had four-wheel drive with each side having independent suspension and its weapon was this big ass spinning helicopter blade that was mounted on a base that could pivot so theoretically if Chuck wasn’t landing hits where he felt he needed to he could just adjust it on the fly and strike from a new angle mid-fight. Again, next level shit for 2015.

All the engineering in the world couldn’t prepare Chuck for what happened in his robot’s very first outing. Ghost Raptor spun up and missed its opponent hitting the arena wall in the process. Okay, whatever, “we’ll get ’em on the next one”. Except there wasn’t a “next one” because that single hit weakened Ghost Raptor’s blade so when it finally did land a hit on its opponent it transferred zero fucking energy and broke in half. This robot, as cool as it was, fucking sucked. The “Sabertooth Cat” thing comes into play because the robot was named Ghost Raptor following the “(WORD) Raptor” scheme that everything from the team used but its chassis was adorned with graphics of a Smilodon, better known as the sabertoothed cat. That’s a prehistoric animal but it’s not a dinosaur which was the theming of the Team Raptor group. It’s also not a bird skull (“raptor” is another name for a bird of prey). In the article I said Chuck “fucked up twice”.

As it turned out Chuck did not have a replacement bar for Ghost Raptor so it lasted one fucking hit before it broke and he had to start inventing random shit in the pits and convince the BattleBots officials that whatever he cobbled together satisfied the new “active weapon” requirement in the event’s rulebook. Ghost Raptor would manage to reach the quarterfinals before being taken out and the robot never saw that level of success again. It is probably better known in certain circles as the sabertoothed cat robot than anything else, and Chuck was the very first target of mockery on BattleBots Update.

I had a hit on my hands. I did everything I could to milk this new meme while trying my best to spawn more of them. Since Ghost Raptor reached the quarterfinals in 2015 that meant it got to skip the preliminaries in 2016 and automatically qualified for the main tournament. 2016 (World Championship II) was the year that BattleBots did that thing where they had the four qualification rumbles for all the newcomers which for some fucking reason included former champion Son of Whyachi??? The winners of these rumbles advanced into the tournament and each of them faced one of the quarterfinalists from 2015. Ghost Raptor drew Son of Whyachi. As Chuck and his robot came out of the big fancy tunnel to do their arena entrance I intentionally got out of my seat, moved into the line of view of the tunnel camera, and waved around a giant sign reading “SABERTOOTH CAT”. This was the pinnacle of the Sabertooth Cat meme.

Chuck looked straight at the sign and I swear to god if that guy were able to pull a Dhalsim and kick me in the face from 20 feet away he absolutely would have. This guy is sending his robot into certain fucking death and when he turns to the crowd to see who’s cheering him on he’s greeted with my dumb ass making fun of his robot. Words on a screen are one thing but now I’m literally there in person and I brought my stupid meme with me. (And yes, the sign made it onto television.)

I think part of Chuck knew he had to embrace the meme. He was a surprisingly good sport about the whole ordeal and a few years into the series reboot he and I got to talking, exchanged friend requests on Facebook, and then a couple years later when I was “having a normal one” Chuck offered some supportive words. He’s a good guy and even though Ghost Raptor was never able to find its place in modern day BattleBots when it eventually was exterminated by Cobalt the imagery of the robot blowing apart into a million pieces ensured that we would never forget his robot. Ghost Raptor found a place in BattleBots history after all by being on the receiving end of the reboot’s equivalent of the Nightmare/Slam Job knock out.

CLOSING

Even though this list is 15 items long there are still a few things that didn’t make the cut. Originally this was supposed to be a 10 item list because that’s just what you do when you make a countdown; who the fuck gets excited for a top fifteen? The magic number is 10, but when I started outlining this article I actually made it to 12 and I couldn’t justify omitting any of them so instead I decided to make a top 20… and then I bottomed out at around 17 and anything else I dug up just felt like needless padding. I settled on 15 and that’s that. Now that we’re here at the bottom of the article I feel the end result came out pretty damn good. There’s a nice assortment of things from Update history and it paints a rightfully very complex picture.

Perhaps not everything on this list fits the conventional definition of “the best of” but I tried to compile a list of things that were at least rooted in something positive or turned out to have a positive impact in the end. There are almost 200 articles live on this website (more than 200 if you count all of the drafts and delisted content such as Antweight Anarchy) so there was a shitload of material to go through. Despite my best efforts I know I probably missed a couple of things. When it comes to what you perceive this website’s best moments to be your opinions might not match up with mine and that’s okay, I’m only the fucking webmaster of this diasterpiece after all.

If you’ve followed this blog since its launch in 2015 then you have my sincerest thanks. This has not been an easy road for either of us, but I’m glad you’ve made it this far with me. I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane. And for those of you who came to this party late I hope you got some insight into a different era of the BattleBots community. I am truly blessed that this project had the encouragement and support of so many different people from all possible walks and regardless of how this project is perceived today nothing can diminish the effect and impact it had when this crazy show was making its way back onto the air after a 12 year hiatus. BattleBots Update was a major player, one of if not the first breakout productions from the reinvigorated community surrounding this show. Its time in the spotlight may have faded a very long time ago but this was a fun article to write, even if putting parts of it together did hit me emotionally at times.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to peruse this countdown. We’re in the palliative care stage of this project so there is no longer a Patreon to pledge to or anything like that and I don’t have anything to plug or promote. I’m just glad you’re here.

Until next time.

– Draco