Last Gladiator Standing Unplugged

The challenge has been cast. The gauntlet thrown down. Many have been called, few have answered. On the planet Hacknor... On Fire Island D, twelve brave contestants will compete. Who will falter? Who will thrive? Who will be

Welcome to Last Gladiator Standing unplugged. I wanted to share with the audience a little behind the scenes look at the show. This is by no means a clip show cheaply and hastily put together to try to get one more week's worth of high ratings. A lot of thought and detail went into this hastily put together show to get one more week's worth of high ratings.

I'll start with a quick rundown of the challenges. I want to let you people know where some of these ideas came from as well as a few that didn't quite make it.

1. Fight The Robot. I wanted to start the whole thing off with a bang and do something physical. I really couldn't make all the challenges about fighting, but I thought this one worked. Obviously, I came up with the idea of the robot mirroring your own abilities to give a challenge to the meta powered and "regular" contestants alike. The shutdown sensors were another parameter set up to give a definite conclusion to the match other than someone trashing the hel out of one.

2. Race Across Hacknor. JawaJuice had a similar challenge for Survivor Tatooine. This is a bit of a rip off, but it's also another physical challenge that all of the contestants could compete in. I made a serious attempt to create a map for it, but that fell through fairly quickly, hence the scratchy piece of garbage that you ended up with. I thought it worked out pretty well and it was the only challenge where I actually had to determine a 1st place.

3. Eating Contest with Starky. The genesis of this challenge hails from the show Fear Factor. They're always eating disgusting food and I had a character from my blog established who cooked awful food.

4. Sidekicks. Another thing that established on my blog is the obnoxious sidekick. If I had to have a grating, unfunny number two, it's only fair that everyone else did as well.

5. Make Fluke Laugh. My original idea for this was to entertain a bunch of kids, which has been used on other reality shows (notably Last Comic Standing). When Fluke agreed to guest host, it quickly devolved into make him laugh.

6. Tour Guide. Another challenge that I saw on last Comic Standing. I liked the idea of entertaining a busload of rubes.

7. Confront Your Mirror Counterpart. One of my story arcs in my blog was Jon's battle with his evil universe twin. It's a well-worn science fiction convention and I thought everyone had really good takes on it. Although my intent was to have people meet in the room, everyone basically took off into his or her evil counterpart's universe. With hilarious results!

8. Call A Match. Not sure where this came from. Basically it was a setup for the next challenge.

9. Clean up The Arena. Pro wrestling's origins are in circus tents and smoky halls. Wrestlers often had to set up their own rings and clean up after. This is that idea taken to the next, disgusting, level.

10. Gender Reversal. You can credit Simon with this one. I had a few ideas, but this one really struck me as a great challenge. Of course, the change had to be temporary, but it also had a lot of potential to go a bunch of different directions.

11. Thunderdome Of Bad Gimmicks. I had to incorporate real-life wrestlers into this one. There are so many bad gimmicks that have been used over the years, I barely scratched the surface. Hard to find photos for some of them, though.

12. Challenge Grab Bag. I wanted to make the final one a bigger challenge than previous. Making it a grab bag like this forced the contestants to come up with their own idea and run with it.

Now some that didn't quite make it:

Entertain the kids. Became make Fluke Laugh.

Build a Battlebot. I thought this would be a good idea, but it was also a little close to fighting the robot. Additionally, where would contestants go with it? "I built a robot. It has a flame thrower." doesn't have as much entertainment value as the challenges that were used, I think.

Battlebot Tournament. This would have been the follow up to building a battlebot. The logistics of figuring out who would win and how someone could get immunity were a little too much.

Bananaphone! My thought was to have the ghost of Jo Jo the Monkeyboy lock everyone in a room and have the song "Bananaphone" playing over and over again. I scrapped that plan because I didn't actually want to read a bunch of posts about the song.

Treasure Hunt. This was a good idea, but it was also similar to the race. I probably could have used it, but obviously I didn't. Maybe Last Gladiator Standing II.

That's it for the challenges. Other thoughts are that I am honestly surprised over the final vote, but having Erifia and Henchman, two of the newer blogs out there, battle it out at the end was great. I am not sure what the deal was with having to boot some of the contestants early. That got annoying as did having to constantly hound a couple people to get them to post. I understand that real life gets in the way and I felt kind of stupid asking people where their posts to my goofy contest were, but there you go. Morpheus remains a mystery to me as the writer seemed to really want to participate but then completely disappeared after one post. Legolas’ non-judging was obnoxious as well, but as it quickly became a non factor, I don’t care to comment on it any further.

On my part, I don't think that I explained the concept as well as I could have at the beginning. I kind of thought people would pick it up quickly because this was already done with Survivor Tatooine and Big Brother Naboo. In any case, once everyone got into the swing it went smooth as Velveeta on a silk stocking.

So saddle up everyone, you're invited to throw in your own two cents. What worked for you? What didn't you like? Have a drink at the LGS Bar while you're at it, Hudson's buying.