[Wids]

"The Deadliest Warrior" was a fun TV series while it lasted, wasn't it? :)

Sure, if you're really anal-retentive about world history, those niggling little details are going to wreck your enjoyment of the show. Joan of Arc's longsword was just for show; she was a good Catholic girl, she was big on holding herself to the "Thou shalt not murder" Commandment, and so she never actually killed anyone with that longsword, even in the heat of battle; that's what her soldiers were there for. So how the show's producers expected her to beat a battle-hardened veteran like William the Conqueror in a toe-to-toe fight is beyond me.

But if you watched the show just as a form of beer-and-pretzels entertainment, The Deadliest Warrior delivered in spades. It was always fun to watch the combat consultants chop up dead pigs and gooey ballistics dummies with various weapons and in various ways, and the consultants themselves tended to be colorful characters. Like Snake Blocker, an Army knife-fighting trainer and full-blooded Apache who was a consultant for the Apache Warrior vs. Roman Gladiator episode. Snake Blocker! How cool of a name is that? Also, Saulius "Sonny" Puzikas, a former Spetsnaz operative who acts as one of the Spetsnaz consultants for the "Green Berets vs. Spetsnaz" episode, somehow manages to be funny and scary at the same time.

But my favorite part of each episode would have to be the simulated re-enactment battles at the end of each episode. I can't really describe why I like them so much; you'll just have to see for yourself. So here's a selection of some of my favorite skirmishes from some of my favorite episodes:

SWAT vs. GSG 9

Comanche vs. Mongol

George Washington vs. Napoleon Bonaparte

Saddam Hussein (and the Republican Guard) vs. Pol Pot (and the Khmer Rouge)

Theodore Roosevelt vs. Lawrence of Arabia

Ivan the Terrible vs Hernán Cortés

Crazy Horse vs. Pancho Villa

Navy SEALs vs. Israeli Commandos

KGB vs. CIA
(Yeah, the video quality sucks. Why are people still camcording TV screens when it's so simple to hook a computer up to a TV and record directly off the video feed these days?)

Celt vs. Persian Immortal

Vampires vs. Zombies

See? :)

So how many of you are familiar with this show? And which episodes are your all-time faves?

[TheShadowEntity]

I never enjoyed the show... My whole course of study is History so i was never able to get over how none of these contestants were even from the same time period. Perfect example was there Knight vs. Samuri style of showing. The Knights of Europe were already gone and replaced by modern gunpowder armies by the time the "modern" Samurai were in affluence. A better episode would have been General Robert E. Lee vs Samurai because that's the time period they actually existed in...... But then that sort of scenario actually happened... its why none are left..



*Disclaimer: This movie was terribly inaccurate but serves well to show the vast technological differences between the two sides as well as the time piriod it takes place in.

[Wids]

...and why do you suppose that the show doesn't always take two combatants from the same time period? Just like playing one of Sid Meier's Civilization games, any two ancient civilizations didn't advance through progressive technologies at the same rate. Sometimes, one civilization completely left another one in the dust, and sometimes, one of the civilizations was ahead in one field of technology (such as agriculture) and lagging behind in another (such as warfare).

The show did take this into account too, since a curbstomp battle wouldn't have made for interesting TV; so the producers did indeed try to match the warriors evenly, though they did slip up a few times (which is why "William Wallace vs. Shaka Zulu" sucked). The time periods did just happen to match up at times (particularly for the modern combatants, thanks to today's global communications uniting the world and helping the world's civilizations share -- or steal -- technological advances); the West's Renaissance came around the time as the Far East's Ming Dynasty, and the martial technology between the two happened to be comparable, so "Musketeer vs. Ming Warrior" just happened to be a good match-up with similar time periods. But all in all, the combatants' respective time periods were the least concern for the show's producers.

Okay, so where are the people who actually liked the show? Speak up, peeps. O_o

[MoreThanThree]

I liked the one with the spartan warriors.

[Wids]

The "Spartan vs. Ninja" episode? Yeah, that was a fun one. The ninja got robbed, though. Whenever ninja did fight (which usually wasn't what they were there to do), it was either with hit-and-run attacks or with dirty fighting (like throwing sand in the Spartan's eyes before sticking him in the throat with a poisoned kunai...stuff like that). Going toe-to-toe with that Spartan soldier was suicide, and a proper ninja should have known that.

But everything is better with ninjas...ninja...whatever the proper plural of "ninja" is. :P

[Bertram Anders]

Ninja

[Wids]

As per its original Japanese language, yes. But you know how English-speaking folk are; we have enough trouble figuring out whether "deer" and "sheep" are singular or plural, right? :P

[Bertram Anders]

Well I just use a colloquial expression and simply call both of them "dinner." It solves many grammatical faux pas.

[Wids]

If you can eat a friggin' ninja, then you've earned the right to call them whatever you want. :P

[Purulent Carcass]

Oh deer.