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.
READ MORE: The 12 Weirdest Reality Shows Ever Made
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.
Every ‘Star Trek’ Movie Ranked From Worst to Best
Every Star Trek movie, from The Motion Picture to Beyond, ranked. Did we get them right?
