Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

American Gladiators is the show where athletically-oriented contenders engage in contests of strength and speed against the Gladiators, an elite phalanx of stunt men, fitness models, and bodybuilders. Foam rubber and metallic silver singlets feature heavily throughout. The original American Gladiators was a direct-to-syndication daytime joke that ran for seven years on channels that were way up the dial, yet somehow everyone has seen a few episodes and enjoyed them.

Remade for 2008, the show has been moved to high-definition NBC, has a faster pace, higher production values, and is hosted by Mohammad Ali’s daughter and Hulk Hogan (as an aside, let’s take a moment to admire Hulk for molding a long-lasting, viable career from nothing but the most ridiculous entertainment commitments). It’s all very stupid, but I’ll be damned if it’s not highly entertaining. Is it the scantily clad men and women in top physical shape? Is it the hilariously overwrought drama that reality TV-sobered producers have foisted on the show? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s really fun watching people get (harmlessly) clocked in the noggin and tossed unceremoniously from substantial heights. Watching the contenders’ bodies betray them as they race through the Eliminator—again, it’s called the Eliminator—is oddly exciting.

The purists are already griping, of course. I, for one, was surprised to learn that American Gladiators purists existed, but there you go. Hulk Hogan in a half-shirt instead of a business suit is unprofessional, they say. The female Gladiators wearing makeup is stupid, they say. The contestants are cherry-picked reality TV attention hogs, they say. The common thread in these complaints is that the remake fails to treat American Gladiators as a sport.

Ahem.

Anyone who confuses this bungee-corded, strobe lit pec pageant with actual sport is seriously misremembering things. The old show may have had commentators in ties and less eyeliner on the women (and men), but it was still ridiculous. You only remember the old show as the better one because that’s the year when you, personally, were twelve (the year in which everything was great, retrospectively). There are already some whispers of game-fixing. How could Koya have blown her huge lead in the Eliminator by struggling for what seemed like an eternity on the reverse escalator, they say. Please. Apparently these conspiracy theorists have never experienced the strange feeling of their bodies just quitting midway through an exercise. The only legitimate gripe I’ve heard is that the editing is too close-up and quick. The complainers are right to say that it makes the action harder to follow.

The complainers need to step back and take things a little less seriously. The new American Gladiators is an entertaining show, one that I think I’m going to be watching. Chad Knight’s abysmal 4-37 point deficit against Anthony Abbatemarco forever proves that skateboarding obviously isn’t a real sport and that firefighters might really be as awesome as we’ve been told. I’m pretty sure this is the only national venue in which I’ll have the opportunity to hear the words, “It looks like justice was just served facially.“