James Cameron – of Avatar and Titanic fame – is helping to create a new robot fighting show for the Discovery Channel.
Although the series is slated to compete against Comedy Central’s Battle Bots, it will apparently attempt to adopt a more dramatic and serious look at the world of robot fighting.
In Robogeddon, contestants build mechanical fighting machines of various shapes and sized which are destined to fight to “the death” in arenas like Roman gladiators of yore. Meaning, the last robot still functioning wins (the image at left is from the Comedy Central show).
Interestingly enough, upcoming series was not included on Discovery’s docket of upcoming shows, which included Top Engineer, a televised engineering contest with various events; One Car Too Far, a ‘man v. nature’ show with a twist – a car which also must survive in the wilderness; Fast and Loud, which is essentially an Antiques Roadshow for cars; and a new show about Alaska with Mark Burnett, the guy responsible for Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
This means either that it’s a new development, or they left it out on purpose to surprise audiences with a separate announcement.
Cameron is responsible for several classic science fiction epics, including the Alien franchise and the Avatar soon-to-be-sequel which has been pushed back to mid-2015. Of course, robot fighting isn’t the only project currently on Cameron’s plate, as besides the Avatar sequel, he’s also working on a documentary which chronicles his recent superdive.
Cameron will be joined at the head of the show by Mark Burnett, who has executive produced numerous succesful reality television shows, including the genre defining Survivor, and game shows like Are you Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
With Cameron’s dramatic and special effects experience and Burnett’s ‘reality’ television experience, this should prove to be a fan favorite right out of the gate. But does it mark the first step on the road to robot fighting domination over the popularity of human-oriented combat sports? Only time will tell…
No premier date has yet been anounced for Robogeddon, but development is in the early stages, so I would expect it to appear on Discovery either this fall or early 2013.
