Great set of interviews with the people who started the Robot Wars phenomenon.
From SB Nation:
Robot Wars -- An oral history of the birth and death of BattleBotsA fun trip down memory lane...
Marin County, Calif., 1992. The Internet has yet to take hold, Jay Leno is the fresh new face of "The Tonight Show," Bill Clinton has just shown off his saxophone bona fides on "Arsenio Hall," and Comedy Central is four years away from the premiere of "The Daily Show" starring Craig Kilborn.
Meanwhile, the best and brightest engineering minds that money can buy gather at Skywalker Ranch, the creative compound filmmaker George Lucas built with his "Star Wars" money, and the nearby headquarters of Industrial Light & Magic. The various departments of Lucas' empire are incestuous and without many barriers; employees cross from one department to the next as easily as Darth Vader crushes necks with his mind. Besides ILM and LucasFilms, a newly created LucasToys division is charged with creating toy replicas of your child's favorite on-screen heroes. Among the toy designers is 44-year-old Marc Thorpe, who prepares a new product pitch for a meeting with Mattel.
Marc Thorpe: I presented an idea that would involve vehicles that had weapons. Hammers and saws and things like that. And Mattel looked at the idea, and their comment was, "Somebody's going to figure out how to do this." And that was that. Meanwhile, I was pursuing an idea of a radio-controlled vacuum cleaner, something to make vacuuming fun, and it wasn't going anywhere. So when I got turned down in the toy presentation, I decided to take the vacuum cleaner off my radio-controlled tank and put weapons on. Then, I decided to stage an event: Robot Wars.
