Gladiators: Ready! Contenders: Ready!
After a pair of recent documentaries revitalized interest in American Gladiators, it’s been revealed that Amazon’s Prime Video is relaunching the classic sports competition series for streaming TV.
A search for contestants for the new version of the show is already underway. As producers put it…
Doing a cross-country casting search is exciting for us, and for the fans. Our goal is to find a real cross-section of America’s fittest and fiercest competitors … This is the ultimate in sports entertainment.
Launched in 1989, American Gladiators became a staple of syndicated television programming all through the 1990s. Every week, yhe show pitted four competitors — two men and two women — against each other in a series of outlandish athletic contests. They also faced off with the show’s “Gladiators,” buffed out body builders and athletes in outlandish sci-fi costumes. At the end of the episodes, the contestants raced to be the first to survive “The Eliminator.”
The show was like The Running Man with slightly lower stakes and a bit less of a sense of humor. It was great.
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In recent years, the creation of the American Gladiators was chronicled in two different documentaries. ESPN made The American Gladiators Documentary, while Netflix had their own miniseries called Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators, which may not have been authorized but did include a lot of contributions former Gladiators, who detailed the highs and lows of working on the show. (Some of their stories were wild.)
Gladiators has been revived once before; after the show was canceled the first time in 1996, it got revived in 2008 with a new cast of characters, updated games, and Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali as the hosts. That version of the series ended after two seasons.
If you’re interested in becoming a contestant on the new American Gladiators, you can apply at this website.
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