American Gladiators: The Original and the Remake(s): Notes

In comparing the original 1989 American Gladiators series with its 2008 NBC remake one sees the distance between one epoch and another in the history of television.

The original was part of a boom in a corner of the TV market that has long passed out of existence--first-run syndicated programming, filled mainly by relatively low-budget fare that promised light, unpretentious, often unashamedly cheesy entertainment to the audience. The blaring of the theme music legendary Hollywood composer Bill Conti wrote for the show set the tone in the opening sequence, evoking the arena scenes of the Roman-era epics of the Hollywood studio era and playing on while the narrator introduced the members of the regular cast by their flashy codenames (Laser! Sabre! Zap!) as one by one they made their grand appearances on the arena floor in their individualized and distinctive red, white and blue costumes, the whole presentation altogether imbuing them with a flamboyance more like that of old-fashioned superheroes than athletes that befit the "gladiatorial" spectacle.

The original show was also reflective of its moment in that it was a bridge between the world of sports and the broader world of entertainment of a kind much more common then than now, like morning workout shows of the kind they used to have on ESPN (a Bodyshaping, for instance), or the "special guest star" spots on that older style of scripted TV show that sports stars so often filled--with the way in which this particular show functioned as such a bridge relevant to what it had to offer. Specifically it had the comparative novelty of (presumably) "regular people" testing their mettle against professional athletes in games which involved few persons at a time (often just two), and were also relatively unusual (Breakthrough and Conquer, Assault, the Wall, etc.), as well as short, and presented without interruption between the cuts to commercial. Endowing the contests with a combination of simplicity, gimmickry, brevity, compactness, they could appeal to people who would never have the patience to sit through a three-hour football or baseball game with their elaborate rules and constant interruptions. The terms of the contests also made it easy for viewers to pay attention to the codenamed, costumed regulars as individuals in a way not the case with the participants in the more prominent team sports with their larger number of players in identical uniforms that (as football helmets do) often conceal the players' faces--and become fans in the process. (It also didn't hurt that, perhaps especially in an era when pin-ups from the world of fitness were popular, the show featured Gladiators like Raye Hollitt, Lori Fetrick, Erika Andersch . . .) In all that it was something different and new and for many appealing as they kicked back this offering of a local TV station some lazy Sunday afternoon.

By contrast the 2008 show put what was a low-budget syndicated show into not just prime time but Big Three network (NBC) prime time--a very different and arguably less appropriate sort of market for this kind of fare than the already nonexistent syndicated market (or the more plausible basic cable market where this might have had a chance). The show looked grander, flashier, slicker in line with the trend to rising budgets and production values in the two decades that had passed between one version of Gladiators and the other, but the sense of unpretentious, cheesy fun was absent. Yes, there were codenames and costumes, but the new names simply didn't have the flair of the old ones (Hellga? Really?), while the costumes were more visually subdued in a way that made it all feel less superhero-like--the shift in the Gladiators' wear comparable to the toning down of so many superhero costumes in the feature films of the twenty-first century, like the difference between the costuming of Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman back in the '70s TV series and Gal Gadot's in the Patty Jenkins films. For many this was less appealing in other ways too. (Many an admirer of the old show preferred the hot glamazons in star-spangled spandex of the original series to the stress on "inclusivity," "body positivity," "diversity" and reserve toward the "male gaze" that characterized the casting and costuming of the later crop at the price of the sex appeal that was, too, part of the fun of the original.) It did not help that the remake, which even in the best of circumstances could never have seemed as fresh and new as the old show in a market crammed with shows in which "regular people" were on television with celebrities engaged in implausible contests before an audience of millions, the producers leaned into the reality TV format by spending a lot more time on the supposed "human interest" of the contestants' personal stories, at the expense of the actual interest of the contests that were the whole point of the thing, and (again), the fun.

As with so many, many other remakes of a twenty-first century in which retreads of old hits can seem to have crowded out everything else the new Gladiators' producers completely missed the point as they showed that they knew a brand when they saw it (not a great intellectual feat given that making this easy is a brand's whole raison d'etre), but not that they can understand why it became a brand in the first place, as they unsurprisingly failed to realize their ambition for a hit (the new version lasting a mere two short seasons totaling 21 episodes whose sole evident legacy all these years later seems to have been helping Gina Carano become known outside the world of Mixed Martial Arts). Still, this was not to be the last attempt to bring Gladiators back. As it happened Gladiators had had its international spin-offs, not least in Britain, where the BBC revived its own version in a 2024 series we are told became a hit with viewers that encouraged the Amazon Prime streaming service to shoot not one but two new seasons of American Gladiators in that country (I imagine, to take advantage of a weak pound and British government subsidy, and maybe to spare the cost of a second, similar, facility at home). Will this new version prove more successful than its predecessor? Perhaps, perhaps not, though I suspect the folks calling the shots will hew closer to the 2008 version than the one we got in 1989, for better or worse.