Battlebots: Bounty Hunters Review (TV Series, 2021)

When Battlebots premiered on Comedy Central in 2000, I never imagined the show would find a perfect home on any network. I still don't understand why a robot combat competition landed on Comedy Central. I'm glad it gave this sport a national platform in the United States. It took robot combat from a kind of underground mechanics competition to a growing network of competitions around the country.

Flash forward to 2015 when the series was rebooted for ABC, then jump one more time to the re-reboot on Discovery Channel in 2018. This is where Battlebots, as a televised competition and not a laugh at these robots freak show, finds its voice. While I miss the inclusion of any weight class except for heavyweight, focusing on one impressive weight class allows more time with the builders and a stronger connection to the competitors.

2021 introduced a new spin-off series with so much potential. Battlebots: Bounty Hunters is a kind of meta-tournament built around the legacy of Battlebots. Each mini-tournament features eight competitors from the 2020 season fighting in a single elimination tournament. The winner gets to battle one of the more iconic robots from the history of the tournament. The bounty for beating the final robot is $25000.

The concept of the tournament is wonderful. These robots are not cheap to build, and some of these competitors received very little screen time on the main season. Their own fights might have been relatively uneventful or a quick knockout shown as a highlight clip. You can find all the unaired fights without commentary on YouTube, so at least the footage is available now.

All the competitors in Bounty Hunters were eliminated from the tournament before the Round of 16. This gives them another episode or two on TV to raise their profile and potentially help them pick up sponsors to come back with improved robots in the future.

For new competitors, this is a golden opportunity. In many tournaments, new robots need a couple fights in actual matches to work as expected. Newer competitors often lose their first fight as they become acclimated to the tournament environment. This is hard, especially in the heavyweight division, where one bad fight can permanently damage key components of a bot. Bounty Hunters gives newer competitors on the series another chance to show off what they can do.

Agreeing to be the bounty bot itself is a no-brainer. You're guaranteed two episodes of the TV show dedicated to how amazing your robot is at the cost of doing one more battle. It’s two hours of love letters to how amazing your work is and how much other competitors respect your design and skills.

Some bounties competed in the tournament this year: Witch Doctor, Tombstone, and Beta. Some of them only participated in the bounty tournament: Icewave, Bronco, and Son of Whyachi.

Regardless of how they performed in the actual Bounty Hunters tournament, all six of these robots and their teams have strong reputations in combat robotics and deserve praise. Remember, Battlebots is not the only tournament in the world, and Battlebots itself has had many major tournaments for decades that never aired on TV.

If you want to talk about opportunity, you need to consider how and when the series was filmed. The 2020 Battlebots tournament got delayed due to Covid-19. We'll never know for sure what the tournament could have looked like in its original intended format as most international competitors were unable to travel into the United States to film.

I believe this led to more new competitors in the tournament who did not have a lot of time to pull their robots together. At least one returning team was encouraged to split off and build a second robot rather than change their original design, which definitely created a shorter building timeline; I suspect there were others.

Put yourself in the shoes of the competitors. They spent thousands of dollars building a robot for a competition that was delayed indefinitely. When they can finally competed, they have to follow all the new production rules with sequestering, testing, and social distancing. A normal Battlebots tournament usually has a full crowd of fans; instead, a small, socially distanced crowd of competitors spread across the stands. The cooperation that happens with teams helping each other—sharing tools, resources, and labor—probably couldn't happen in the same way for health and safety reasons. You lose your first fights in the tournament and you're done.

Enter Bounty Hunters. This tournament was filmed at the same time as the round of 16 in the Battlebots tournament. Competitors who didn't make it as far got more of an experience out of the strangest tournament in the history of Battlebots. They're interviewed, showed off what their robots can do, and had at least one more fight that's guaranteed to air on TV as part of the new show format.

The cash prize can be life changing for these competitors. Remember, this was filmed after months of quarantine. Some of these competitors were underemployed or even unemployed for a long time. This is touched on during the series, but not in a way that feels exploitative. The series is a celebration of people using their intelligence, creativity, and knowledge to build impressive robots.

I hope the Bounty Hunters series continues in the future. Battlebots is one of the more popular shows on the Discovery Channel right now and the spin-off series did well with audiences. It makes sense to make the most of a large field of competitors and an active production to film another series.

Think of it this way. Filming two tournaments at once gives the competitors in the traditional tournament more time to fix their robots and put on better fights. The concept works as a TV show and improves the quality of the Battlebots tournament.

Battlebots: Bounty Hunters is streaming on Discovery+.