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Post by penguincatfish on Mar 28, 2016 4:08:34 GMT -5
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Post by penguincatfish on Apr 15, 2016 15:58:21 GMT -5
The show premieres Monday, June 13 and June 20 at 10/9c before moving to its regular time on Thursday, June 23 at 9/8c. The original press release said 6 teams per episode with a total of 36 teams, the latest release and official site said 3 teams per episode, now it's back to 6. NBC and their numbers
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Post by thatoneuser on Apr 15, 2016 16:24:37 GMT -5
Sounds interesting, I'm in.
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2016 15:09:30 GMT -5
I bet the contestant pool is going to be 75% ANW competitors.
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Post by penguincatfish on May 6, 2016 2:45:25 GMT -5
Some picsIt seems like it's mostly Spartan people, although Kevin Bull appears in one of the Instagram pics. I'd be surprised if we don't see many of them in ANW.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2016 2:54:28 GMT -5
They better not have Ralph Avallone or I will instantly turn off my TV.
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Post by penguincatfish on May 14, 2016 0:54:22 GMT -5
Official Trailer
There will be 36 teams.
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Post by penguincatfish on Jun 13, 2016 23:57:10 GMT -5
Tonight was the first episode. 6 teams, 3 teams per heat. Winner of each heat and fastest runner up for wildcard in the last heat. Winner of the episode moves on to the Championship. It started off on Heat 2, after a commercial break they fast-forwarded the results of Heat 1 with a bit more detail going into the last heat. Only one team got a complete fluff piece at the beginning. It also seems like there was only a fluff piece after every other commercial break, so we got to see more action. I know it's to build suspense/tension, but I thought it was funny when they cut to commercial whenever someone was taking too long to do something. Getting your feet out the water - COMMERCIAL! Jumping off a log - COMMERCIAL! Scooting across a log - COMMERCIAL! Everyone falls and log leaves without them - COMMERCIAL! I don't think they showed every obstacle, but they did add one for the last heat. The preview for next week showed they modified at least one obstacle, so hopefully it doesn't get repetitive. Throughout the entire episode I was mostly thinking, if this was in Japan, the H&S alarm would explode after each obstacle. Also the E. coli in the mud.
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Post by thatoneuser on Jun 14, 2016 22:35:18 GMT -5
Hoo boy, that was bad. And we thought ANW's production values sucked.
The production team made every effort to make people not care one bit about the competition. Dhani was probably told to just be Matt Iseman and it showed - his commentary felt forced and uninteresting. Kyle, meanwhile, must have been told to be Jonny Mosely (enough said). Their strategy to get people to care about the close battle for second was to digest the first heat from which two of the three teams qualified for the finals, which is as bad of an editing move as I've ever seen. The commentators did little to introduce the obstacles, apparently because production felt that we would get confused by having too many obstacles. (We did, because nobody explained them.) In addition, the obstacles they chose felt really, really dumb, and that may be a gripe against OCR or the format but it did not make for good TV at all. Speaking of the format, it was dumb too, and it was not helped by the fact that we were supposed to remember fifteen people's stories at once. And by the way, this is an OCR show, not the Hallmark channel. I don't give a flying crap about stories. I want to see these people do obstacles, and they made every effort to not show that.
This was an all time bad performance. I will not be tuning in for episode two.
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Post by narcissus1916 on Jun 15, 2016 0:02:28 GMT -5
The footage of the race itself was solid, and the fluff pieces weren't too longwinded. I'll be watching.
But yeah, those editing choices can eat a dick. Fastforwarding entirely through one entire heat (and giving two teams no air time whatsoever) is a terrible choice. Wondered if they pitched this as a two hour or 90 minute show and they got cut down to 1 hour.
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Post by penguincatfish on Jun 21, 2016 0:16:24 GMT -5
Tonight's episode was similar to last week with the formatting. Very few fluff pieces. Only one team got a 60 second piece before the start, and another team got a 30 second piece shortly after getting to the Lake Swing. The featured individual story of the week was played halfway through Heat 3 during Hurricane Alley (the part where they carry the logo down a long road) and was only 1 minute and 15 seconds long. A major improvement over last week is that they didn't cut to commercial whenever someone was taking too long to do something. They focused on teams making progress, rather than individuals stalling. Evan Dollard was on tonight's Oklahoma City for some cross-promotion. They mentioned a few ANW competitors who will be on Spartan - Kevin Bull, Grant McCartney, Neil Craver, Lance Pekus. Solomon Harvey from tonight's Spartan competed last year in Orlando. Don't know if he competed this year. Tonight... we saw... Thong Man...
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Post by koeniou on Jun 25, 2016 7:53:38 GMT -5
I'm liking it enough to keep watching. I really like that some of the obstacles are built to require all 5 members - 1 person can't just carry the whole team (which happened a bit in Team Ninja Warrior).
I really wish they just showed all the teams running (fast forwarding a whole heat is so annoying), possibly as a split screen? They wouldn't be able to to mess with the editing for "drama" I guess.
I'm looking forward to seeing the ANW people try it - its a very different type of racing.
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Post by narcissus1916 on Jun 26, 2016 15:52:37 GMT -5
I'm not sure how to feel about calling it Spartan though. It has many of the same obstacles, but the whole point of Spartan is ludicrous amounts of endurance. Removing that into a tight course makes for easier editing but removes some of the appeal.
Particularly given that the course still isn't small enough to just show the majority of the run (or even most obstacles).
I watched BattleFrog on ESPN the other day, and the course is hilariously dinky and small in comparison. But its also thrilling because you can see how every small stumble or hiccup can cause a loss.
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Post by penguincatfish on Jun 30, 2016 1:43:26 GMT -5
Just saw last week's episode 3. They did things slightly different. The individual feature story was shown at the start of the first heat instead of during the last. The last heat focused on the perceived rivalry between David Magida who talked about his strategy of attacking weakness vs. Hunter McIntyre (#1 ranked two years ago) and his team of 40-somethings.
Fun fact - Hunter McIntyre is the current men's champion of Steve Austin's Broken Skull Challenge. This means he'll get a chance to run the updated Skull Buster course to set a new time for the start of next season.
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Post by penguincatfish on Jun 30, 2016 23:47:54 GMT -5
Kevin Bull and Lance Pekus were on tonight's episode! It was funny in their first heat when they both tried to go Warped Wall mode on the Slip Wall only to flop hard.
During the Heat 1 recap, they showed team captain Natalie Miano powering up the wall solo, which was really cool.
Also funny was when the team captain of the married couples was holding up the last barbed wire during the Army Crawl and let it go too soon smacking his wife in the back, followed by a slow motion replay and a freeze frame.
I believe tonight was the first time they didn't fast-forward the Log Traverse. All three teams got there at the same time.
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Post by koeniou on Jul 2, 2016 9:41:27 GMT -5
During the Heat 1 recap, they showed team captain Natalie Miano powering up the wall solo, which was really cool. I'm guessing that Kevin and Lance saw her do it, and hoped that they could manage it as well?
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Post by penguincatfish on Jul 5, 2016 4:29:10 GMT -5
She crawled up the wall slowly, while Kevin and Lance seemed like they were desperately trying to sprint up it like a Warped Wall.
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Post by penguincatfish on Jul 14, 2016 22:46:29 GMT -5
Tonight was "Spartan vs. Ninja: The Sequel" featuring Neil Craver and Grant McCartney on team Free Spirits. {Spoiler}In their first heat, they were the only team this season to complete the course under 20 minutes! Craver slid through the Army Crawl effortlessly fast - 110 ft. in 21 seconds, they said. They managed to land every member on the platform at the Lake Swing in both their heats. In the final heat, Joy messed up her ankle hard on the landing of the Log Lift slider portion, about 1/3 into the course. Their opponent was Castle Rock Commandos which had three guys who were in Special Forces, one of them being team captain Robert Killian the 2015 Spartan Race World Champion. It was close but the ninjas managed to win.
Next week is the two hour finale! Two hours means we should see all the heats, and hopefully a more intense course. Don't know how they'll fill an extra half hour, unless they change the format, or add in a jack ton of obstacles for the final heat. We'll see!
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Post by matt723894 on Jul 17, 2016 11:42:29 GMT -5
Just took a look at the ratings, and this show is failing hard. Ever since the move to thursday, the number of viewers plummeted. The only times the number of viewers went up was when people from anw were on. Don't expect this show to get renewed to season two.
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Post by SasukeForever on Jul 24, 2016 8:28:45 GMT -5
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