Editorial: Deadliest Warrior Was Weird

this show is not animated, but it's been on my mind recently and since my last DeviantArt journal wasn't viewed by many people, I figured I'd share it here. Deadliest Warrior was probably one of my favourite shows as a kid, I liked seeing all these cool pieces of weaponry and of course, all the violence. I was young, and I was easy to enthrall, very easy actually, just tell me to run around a field and I'd probably do it twice, but I digress. I remember catching episodes on TV as they aired, which is not something I normally did, I kept watching until part way into season 2, I know I skipped one episode before I stopped altogether, and then continued to watch some episodes online back when you could watch full episodes of some shows on the channels website. Looking back on it now, the show is very flawed, and I won't get into the historical inaccuracies, since A) I am not knowledgeable enough to know what I am talking about, and B) there are other places you can find that information. Instead, I'm going very surface level, and looking at the concept and the match-ups.

Deadliest Warrior was one of those shows that was pseudo-education but the main draw was something very primal, Spike had a couple of these shows with 1000 Ways to Die and Manswers airing at the same time. The main draw for this show was, on the surface level violence, but it was also seeing these cool historical weapons being used. This was before YouTube was really full of niche channels which would do things like this. The main idea was to take two sets of historical warriors and test some weapons they may have and see who would win a fight. This concept seemed promising, but they changed the type of warriors by Season 3. In season one it was mostly generic types, like Gladiator, Samurai, Pirate, Mafia, Maori etc. They had two historical figures duke it out, and that felt like a special occasion, then by season three it was mostly historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Hernán Cortés, Crazy Horse, with only two (Ish, we'll talk about that) warrior types. It didn't feel special anymore, and kind became lame, and the "Generic Warrior" battles didn't feel special either because it was most of Season 1 already. They should have just picked one or the other here, I would have loved a show with just historical figures, and we could have gotten some more interesting warriors with it, like Blackbeard, King Kamehamea I, Aaron Burr, really, that alone would have been a great draw.

However, let's move on to the meat of what made this show weird, and here I want to disclose that I haven't watched this show in a while, this is all very surface level analysis so take all my words here with a grain of salt. So many of the match-ups in this show were odd choices, bordering on the idiotic and the show just looks like it is full of missed opportunities. For example, let's look at the first episode, which for some reason had an Apache Warrior fighting a Gladiator. I don't know what to feel about this, because what do these two have in common? Fighting for freedom? Okay, but the ways they fought for it was very different, I mean Gladiators were entertainers, in fact it is currently believed that death matches between gladiators became less common over time. On top of that, who even thought about that? No one, because that isn't a good match-up, a good match-up should actually make you curious, like even if the pairing makes little sense, it could still give you something to think about, this match-up only makes me think "Who really is asking this?"

Any other weird match-ups? How about episode 3, Spartan vs Ninja. Like, what even is the similarity here? These two are completely different leagues, Spartans were an organized Greek military, Ninjas were rogue assassins at deadliest. Ninjas were meant to be unseen, Spartans were meant to me in the middle of combat. Episode 7 had Maori Warriors facing Shaolin Monks, again I'm missing the connection here. Episode 17 had Persian Immortals vs Celts, even as a kid I knew that was a dumb match, like how in the world could a Celt stand up against a Persian? Episode 20 had Ming Dynasty Warriors facing French Musketeers, and I gotta say, the technology different between the two gives one such an unfair advantage. That episode was followed by the Comanche vs Mongol, again failing to see any connection, hey I got an idea, since both their lands were invaded by an opposing army that they stood their ground against, why not Comanche vs Celt? The weirdest match-up was the final episode, episode 32 where they were either so desperate for rating or they knew it was their final episode so they just said screw it, but they decided, for their final episode, to do Vampires vs Zombies, two fictional monsters that aren't even warriors, that'd be like if they did an episode with Jeffrey Dahmer vs Ed Gein, they're killers, not warriors.

But the worst match-ups were when they had historical figures in the ring. I've looked through the full list, and you know how many don't work as a match-up? Too many! Their first historical figures match was William Wallace vs Shaka Zulu, which makes no sense, like again, the technology difference between the two is unfair and Shaka Zulu is more recent than William Wallace, Shaka Zulu died in 1828, The United States of America was already half a century old at the time, and that was the first historical figure match-up, where could it go from there? Somehow both up and down at the same time, like here are the rest of the historical figures match-ups:
Alexander the Great vs Attila the Hun
Jesse James vs Al Capone
Sun Tzu vs Vlad the Impaler
George Washington vs Napoleon Bonaparte
Joan of Arc vs William the Conqueror
Genghis Khan vs Hannibal
Saddam Hussein vs Pol Pot
Theodore Roosevelt vs Lawrence of Arabia
Ivan the Terrible vs Hernán Cortés
Crazy Horse vs Pancho Villa

Out of all those match-ups, the only one I think actually works, like one hundred percent works, is George Washington vs Napoleon Bonaparte, legit that is a good one. However, most of the other match-ups, like, some of them I kind of see what they're aiming for, but could still think of better opponents for them, like I understand Jesse James and Al Capone, but why not Al Capone vs Pablo Escobar? I understand Crazy Horse and Pancho Villa, but why not Crazy Horse vs Louis Riel, pit Pancho Villa against Aaron Burr or something. I swear the only reason they had Saddam Hussein vs Pol Pot was because Fidel Castro was still alive at the time.

The entire idea of the show becomes flawed when I, a broke ass hobbyist blog writer with only a very amateur understanding of history can think of better match-ups for many of these warriors when a team of "Experts" can't. Like, I feel like some of these were just ways to get certain warriors into the show, like "We need to have William Wallace in here somewhere, who can he fight? Owain Glyndŵr? Welsh rebel, nah, how about Shaka Zulu, who reformed the Zulu army into a real military force? That match up makes perfect sense!"

I'd actually really like to talk with actual historians about this because, the idea of "Who wins in a fight" is an amazing draw, if the popularity of the online series Death Battle and the existence of a Vs Battle Wiki is any indication. So, doing this with historical figures would seem really cool, but these match-ups just don't feel like much thought was put into them, I looked at each episode match-up and found that out of thirty-two episodes, only seven made anything close to reasonable sense, if we want to be generous and include the ones I can see making some sense, that adds another eight to the total of fifteen, that is just sad. Maybe someday I'll watch the whole show and see just what they were thinking, but on a surface level, this show was weird, full of missed opportunities and just kind of dumb. Sounds about right for a Spike TV Show.