In news that in no way made our bodies emit the dark, “filled with the phlegm of basic human misery” kind of chuckle this afternoon, BattleBots announced this week that it’s bringing back its celebration of weaponized robots—but now with an extra dose of AI, and the very public backing of an Israel-based tech company. Absent from TV since its most recent season aired on Discovery Channel back in 2023, the long-running mechanized combat series will soon begin debuting new episodes on YouTube, the better to more readily share the joys of violent robots with the international community. How considerate!
It feels worth pointing out that this news (per THR) first broke back on Thursday, so any connections that your, and our, and everybody’s brains might be making to the intersections between ‘bots and battle today are not actually the series’ fault. Less so: The decision to include in the show’s new roster of death machines a combatant named Orbitron that’s being billed as “the world’s first AI-controlled robot,” or—more pointedly—to repeatedly mention, in the promotional materials for this 20-episode “Pro League” season, that the whole thing is being sponsored by BrightData, an Israel-based tech company that seems to exist largely so it can scrape existing websites for data that it then feeds to AI. All of which is being presented with the franchise’s typical bombast and gusto, which is sometimes charming, and sometimes—depending on the context of any other news that might be kicking around in your skull on any given Saturday afternoon—just sort of horrifyingly grim.
For the uninitiated: BattleBots has a long history both on-and-off TV, having been based off of a series of Robot Wars competitions from the late ’90s that were an early streaming success online. The series proper (which existed for many years in a sort of running arms race with the U.K.’s own RobotWars to see which program could broadcast the better brand of remote-control mayhem) aired its first several seasons on Comedy Central in the early 2000s, before being revived on ABC in 2015; that revival eventually migrated over to Discovery Channel, where the show aired from 2018 to 2023. This new season will, at the very least, debut entirely on YouTube, although THR notes that it may be shopped to networks in international markets after its online debut. Filming for the season will begin in April, provided we all get there.
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