Feeling nostalgic for the old NES “American Gladiators” game I decided to check out the new incarnation of the show. Boy was I surprised at just how fake the show was. Not only do the producers overly manipulate the editing, but they its obvious that the gladiators are coached on when to act tougher.

If you’ve seen the new show, you know what I’m talking about. It happens when one of the two contestants has a major lead. All of a sudden one of the gladiators will make an intentional mistake and it allows the underdog to score. This happened over and over gain during the first two airings.

The funny thing is that the producers do their best to cover up the “intentional mistakes” with bad editing. They constantly break the 180 degrees rule so that the angles are disorienting and it makes it less likely someone would notice. ((The 180° rule states that two characters in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis it flips the left/right relationship of everything in the scene.))

Also, the cuts between edits don’t always match up. This makes no sense because they are filming with multiple cameras. If the cameras are capturing the same thing then it would be easy to do a match-action cut. The fact that there are continuity problems implies they are either trying to cover something up or that they are doing multiple takes and are editing them together.

In other “fakeness” it’s clear that they coach the contestants before they ask them questions. For example this one guy told Hulk Hogan, “Yeah he was darn slippery, but I just imagined he was a greased pig at a fair and I took him down.” If the actual sentence wasn’t suspect enough, the ridiculous way it was delivered makes porn-acting seem worthy of an academy award.

Update: A commenter shared this video which demonstrates what I’m talking about.