"Robot Wars 2016" – On the Box

Robot Wars number one fan The Mighty Jontosaurus relives the highlights of the epic new series…
It came, it saw, it conquered, and it smashed absolutely everything into a thousand tiny pieces. The new series of Robot Wars was as destructive as I thought it would be, and in the end, history repeated itself when a mighty spinner and a powerful flipper met in the grand final. Reminiscent of the series 3 grand final where Hynodisc and Chaos 2- two of the most iconic machines in Robot Wars in history battled it out, with the latter triumphing, this year’s final saw the fantastic Carbide meet the entertaining Apollo in the final.
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Pokémon: Indigo League – Nostalgia Trip

Guest blogger Jontosaurus sees your current Pokémon Go fixation and raises you one youthful obsession with a certain extremely famous and much-loved Saturday morning cartoon…
Admit it. As soon as you read the title, you began humming the theme tune. If you’re of the more…ahem…geeky nature, you maybe even began singing it at the top of your lungs. Air grabs and all.
Like many children of that generation, I was gripped by Pokemon fever- a hideous disease that infected pretty much every child of school age. I just couldn’t get enough.
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'Robot Wars' – On the Box

It’s finally here! And it’s safe to say guest blogger Jontosaurus was pretty darn excited about it!
It only took twelve years, but it arrived in blistering fashion. Although I was somewhat disappointed that the show was devoid of its once amazing theme tune. Yes, Robot Wars returned to our screens, with the first frantic and destructive episode proving that the new boys can do it alongside the old ones.
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'Gladiators' – Nostalgia Trip

In wich guest blogger Jontosaurus has something to admit…
Jet was well fit. That is how I’m going to start my article – with a whole-hearted confession that yes, I did find her to be the best of all of the female Gladiators. I was probably too young to really understand what to do with my youthful hormones but I understood that Jet was young, attractive and ever so flexible. That was enough for me.

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Jet: the object of many boys youthful hormones!

But I digress- it’s that time again where I delve into the annals of television history with very little protective gear and emerge with another artifact from television’s glorious past. It’s another nostalgia trip and, as you’ve probably worked out for my ever so subtle introduction, it’s the time for Gladiators to be put under the microscope. The show actually earned itself a reboot on Sky in the not too distant past.
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"Walking with Dinosaurs" – Nostalgia Trip

Guest blogger Jontosaurus takes us for a walk through his favourite prehistoric wildlife show…
The one problem I had with Jurassic Park and the army of sequels it spawned was simply the factual inaccuracy of it all. Sure, it is decent cinematic value for money to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex lay the smack-down on a car, especially when that car contains two screaming children- who, you know, would really have improved their chances of survival if they weren’t making all of that damn noise and drawing attention to themselves– but my main issue is that you didn’t learn anything. As a child, I was fascinated by dinosaurs, so much so that my idea of a fun day out was not to visit a theme park, but to go to a dinosaur museum or to visit the beach along our infamous ‘Jurassic Coast’ for fossil walks and fossil hunts. Yeah…I was THAT kind of kid. For me, the age of the dinosaurs was a fascinating part of natural history that I felt needed more attention and a whole lot more respect paid to it than an overblown (although undeniably enjoyable) Hollywood blockbuster could muster. In my opinion, we don’t need to plant a dinosaur in the centre of Manhattan in order to make people’s jaws drop- dinosaurs were awesome enough in their own right.
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'The Crystal Maze' – Nostalgia trip

Take a little trip through four perilous zones with guest blogger Mr Jontosaurus
“Start the fans, please!!!!”
Strap yourselves in, boys and girls, because its time for a nostalgia trip. Let me take you back to a time when health and safety was a fallacy, when a person could go on a gameshow and run the risk of potentially breaking every bone in their body. To a time when all of this risk was just seen as good old fashioned fun. If you shattered your skull, it didn’t matter, because look, you’ve won a microwave and your head was kind of a weird shape to begin with, anyway. I talk, of course, about The Crystal Maze.
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'Robot Wars 2016' – The Mechanised Carnage Returns!

Grrr! Arrgh! It’s new guest blogger Jontosaurus! When he isn’t drunk on cider and driving tractors in sleepy old Somerset, the enigmatic and endangered Jontosaurus likes to watch anything with zombies or aliens in it, anything with explosions, or anything with explosions and aliens and zombies all combined. His favourite shows at The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, Robot Wars, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, and anything with a good story and compelling characters.
He is also writing a sci-fi novel entitled “Deimos Has Fallen” which features aliens, space zombies and explosions. 

Visit him at his blog, but first – why is everyone excited about Robot Wars?
 
Back in the 1990s, we all got a severe shock to the system when the BBC announced a new game show entitled Robot Wars. It was a concept that they had taken from our friends across the pond, who had been televising robotic destruction for a few years already, and they adapted it for British audiences. Series 1 saw Jeremy Clarkson – still an unknown and over a decade away from punching a man in the face over a sandwich – presenting a show, and Phillippa Forester wearing an outfit that wouldn’t look out-of-place in an S&M dungeon as she trundled about the ‘pit’s talking to the roboteering teams and pretending to be impressed by their creations.

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Jeremy Clarkson – original Robot Wars presenter and violence fan

In its infancy, this show was just hilarious – a demonstration of both the brilliance and eccentricity of the teams behind the machines. For every revelation such as eventual champion Roadblock, there were terrible contraptions such as Prince of Darkness, a box on wheels with wooden armour, exposed rubber wheels and a paint job that looked as if it had been done by a five-year-old… whilst they were in a deep sleep.
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