"Gladiators, are you ready?"

Please, tell me you didn't miss the premiere of NBC's American Gladiators tonight.

The two-hour reinvention of the 90's classic aired tonight and introduced America to 14 new Gladiators ready to whoop on some short and comparatively scrawny contenders: Blast, Crush, Fury, Hellga, Siren, Stealth and Venom for the women, and Hammer, Justice, Mayhem, Militia, Titan, Toa and Wolf for the men.

A little fun fact: Titan is the only Gladiator to be on both the original and the remake of the series, and Toa is the cousin of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

I was stoked for this show to start and tonight's double showing was entertaining, but honestly...it was a little too WWE for my taste. The extremely terrible overacting and audience singing "Nananana, hey hey hey, goodbye" every time someone fell into the water, sprinkled with the occasional heartfelt testimonial and shout out to the loving family, I felt like it was like fake-o wrestling meets Oprah Winfrey.

Also, I was pretty disappointed by how nice the female Gladiators were being. Don't shake that bitches hand--kick her while she's down!!

The 2008 American Gladiators leaves 1991 loyalists with much to be desired, but I was pleased to see the return of Assault (where contenders aim arrows and rockets at Gladiators while dodging 100-mph tennis ball shots) and the ever-popular Eliminator, which destroyed and embarrassed several of tonight's contenders.

I'm predicting the show probably won't last longer than this season (or until the strike ends), but for a shot of old school, cheesy, barbaric entertainment, check out the second part NBC's 2008 American Gladiators premiere tomorrow night at 8 p.m.

UPDATE: Titan appeared on a local radio show this morning saying that tonight's episode features a nice bone breaking - whoo hoo!

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