// `u`” Here’s Tucker! My back and hip are starting to ache, so I’m gonna take a quick break... Noland is the only one left! I’ll probably do the colouring tomorrow.
You asked for off-topic content, so we're gonna talk about one of my obsessions from the past year: BATTLE DOME.
I know there's a lot of Y2K-era nostalgia now, but if you lived through the Bush years, you probably remember that the early 2000s were a cultural wasteland of amped-up, testosterone-addled, hyper-sexualized garbage.
At the top of that pile was BATTLE DOME, a short-lived TV game show that aired for two years in syndication, presumably to low viewership. BATTLE DOME attempted to blend the over-the-top athletic competition of American Gladiators with the hypermasculine, character-driven soap opera of professional wrestling.
The result was maybe the stupidest show ever to air on television: an extraordinarily dangerous game show where competitors regularly walked away with serious injuries, interrupted by scripted melodrama that played like it was written by and for horny middle schoolers. It is spectacular, and it's almost too unintelligible to be offensive.
The pitch for Battle Dome is simple: three random competitors compete in a series of demanding physical events against THE WARRIORS, an ensemble cast of underemployed Los Angeles-based bodybuilders, stuntmen, and MMA fighters, who have come together here to play a collection of cultural stereotypes and beat the absolute shit out of the hapless contestants.
Here's one of the warriors, Mike O'Dell, a grotesquely muscular dude presented as a white-clad golden god with uncomfortable Aryan overtones. He's at least a head taller than all the contestants and could probably eat them.
There's also T-Money, played BY A YOUNG PRE-FAME TERRY CREWS IN HIS FIRST ACTING ROLE. Getting him on this show was an incredible casting coup in hindsight.
Every event on Battle Dome has a simple objective, like knocking your opponent off the monkey bars. Except this is Battle Dome, so the monkey bars are 15 feet off the ground. And the bars are shaking. And there's a massive man kicking you in the chest.
They call it Aerial Kickboxing.
But the real highlight of Battle Dome are the terrible wrestling plotlines they interject between (or sometimes even during) the events. They're usually arbitrary, poorly written, and just an excuse to make the beefy men fight each other. In this episode, T-Money is pissed at O'Dell because he's underperforming.
After an episode's worth of O'Dell and T-Money throwing barbs at each other, they finally must come to blows. Bobbie Haven, the "sexretary" to the Battle Dome Chairman, demands that the warriors must compete in ULTIMATE BODY SLAM to decide who is the number one warrior!
What is ULTIMATE BODY SLAM, you ask?
I've never been into pro wrestling, but I get the sense that part of the fun of pro wrestling is being a "mark," suspending your disbelief and buying into the fake reality. I do not know how you can do that for Battle Dome. The problem is that the Battle Dome warriors are competing against real humans, which makes their fake absurd antics even faker and more absurd. There is no kayfabe. There is no hermetically sealed world of Battle Dome fiction. This is more like Legends of the Hidden Temple with punching.
But you know what's definitely not fake on Battle Dome? The violence. This show is brutal. Concussions are received. Bones are broken. Even the actors aren't immune to injury. Terry Crews said years later that he almost got set on fire once during an event.
The tagline for the show was "Real Warriors, Real Pain," and at least the second one of those is correct. Pain is the only real thing in the bizarre world of Battle Dome, where emotional truths have been replaced by body slams.
This is clearly not a good television show, and it is incredibly fun. 20+ years removed from airing, it's much easier to laugh at. If I wanted to show someone what American culture felt like at the turn of the millennium, I would show them Battle Dome. I would show them its bacchanalia of testosterone, its bizarre miscalculation of human drama, its Tommy Wiseau-style acting and understanding of women, its unrelenting grinder of human bodies, and then I would get popcorn.
PS: Here are the two announcers for Battle Dome: Steve Albert (right), professional sportscaster; and Scott Ferrall (left), shock jock and professional feral man, dressed like he's about to go on a cruise inside a surrealist painting. Albert does the play-by-plays, while Ferrall screams incoherent horny color commentary in a gravely voice that sounds like he's been smoking six packs of cigarettes a day since kindergarten. They are truly a dynamic duo.
