The unexpected revival of American Gladiators in 2023

Here's the trailer for the Netflix docu-series about American Gladiators which started airing on Netflix on June 28.  I haven't seen either the Netflix shows or the ESPN documentary.  The hit TV show, which ran for 8 seasons from 1989-1996, has suddenly popped back up, with a new edition of the British version of the show, Gladiators, coming out.  I heard a rumor of a U.S. reboot of the show, but haven't seen any definite info.  

ESPN 30 for 30 doc- The American Gladiators Documentary trailer

Chillin' with Ice podcast- by Lori Fetrick, Ice from American Gladiators  (several episodes are out)

American Gladiator TV show intros- 1989-1997

All this talk about American Gladiators this year, and not one shout out to Lico the spotter (coolest TV industry person I ever met), and not one word about the "Puppet People"  What the fuck people?  

So... most of you who read this blog know me, or know of me, from my days as a mediocre BMX freestyler, and BMX/skateboard industry guy in the 1980's.  I stumbled into video work completely accidentally in 1987, when my boss at the American Freestyle Association asked me to produce a contest video.  That first video (see the previous post) led to more videos, and a job at Unreel Productions later that year.  Unreel was the video arm of the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear empire in the late 1980's.  I worked there from December 1987, until July of 1990.  With the skateboard, BMX, and snowboard industries all tanking then, there was a mass exodus.  

A woman I worked with at Unreel found a job at a "real" TV production company in Studio City, just over the hill from Hollywood.  One day, a few months later, she gave me a call.  "We need someone to log a bunch of footage where I'm at, what are you up to?"  I wasn't up to much, so I made the long drive from Huntington Beach to The Valley the next day, where I spent ten hours logging footage of interviews of monster truck and mud racing drivers.  Logging is industry talk for watching the footage of the event, and taking notes, like "John from Bigfoot jokes about blowing a tire at 43:27."  Not exciting, but it paid.  They asked me to come back the next day, and the next, and the next.  I worked on a day by day basis for two months, I think.  Finally they made it official, and called me full time.  That's how I got my first "real" TV job at G.R.B. Motorsports, working on the production crew (office staff) of that year's supercross and monster truck TV series.  

Those kinds of productions last for a few months, and we rented office space in a large building from a production/edit company called Four Point Entertainment.  By the time I quit that GRB a few months later, I was doing three jobs for the price of one.  They hired two P.A.'s to replace me, and part of the work still wasn't getting done.  

Four Point was where American Gladiators shows were edited.  The next year, I called up the secretary and asked if Gladiators needed people that summer.  I called too early, and had to call back a couple of times.  Finally the secretary said, "We have two jobs available, talent attendant and spotter."  "What's a talent attendant?" I asked.  She told me that it was a person to ran errands and pretty much got the Gladiators whatever they needed, "I wouldn't give that job to my worst enemy," she laughed.  "OK, what's a spotter?"  "I have no idea?" she replied.  "Sounds good, put me on the list as a spotter."  So she did.  

A month later, I walked onto the CBS-MTM studio lot, in Studio City, as we called it then, and looked for Stage 3.  I had no idea what my job was going to be.  That's how I got a job on a hit TV show for season 5, in the summer of 1992.  I worked the final four seasons as a spotter, those guys on the sideline with the white karate pads.  I didn't like the American Gladiators TV show before that, and made fun of my roommate Bill, who was a big fan of the show.  But it was a lot of fun, and really hard work, to work on it, and I'm glad I took the job.  I worked the last four of the eight seasons of the show.  I was the head spotter, leader of 7 other guys on the crew, for the last two seasons.  

We worked for about 6 or 7 weeks in the summer, when almost every other show was on hiatus, the TV industry term for summer vacation.  So the huge lot was pretty much empty when we taped the show.  We had 6 or 7 days of practice, where both Gladiators and contenders would practice the different games, on opposite sides of the huge, aircraft hanger size stage.  Since they were the show, both groups needed people to practice against.  The producers didn't want either Gladiators or contenders to get injured before we taped the shows, so us spotters practiced several of the games against both.  We played Gladiators for the contenders, and played contenders for the Gladiators.  So I ran through Break Through and wrestled in the Conquer ring, played Powerball, ran through The Gauntlet, and practiced against them with pugil sticks.  I was in pretty decent shape then, having worked moving as a furniture mover for a while.  But I still got knocked around a lot.  I got the worst concussion of my life when little April Wheat from Texas got thrown down the pyramid, did a flip, and accidentally heel-kicked me in the side of the head.  My pupils wouldn't change size for 2 1/2 days, so that was a pretty good concussion.  But, overall, it was a lot of fun.  

Then we moved to the actual taping of the shows, and we taped two shows each day, completing the whole season in about 5 weeks.  We'd set up one game, have the contests for two separate shows, then clear that out, and set up another game.  Us spotters worked with the grips, riggers, and camera crew to change the sets.  One old crew guy told me we did the biggest set changes in the history of TV, and we did them 7 times a day.  Most sitcoms might do a couple of set changes, much, much smaller ones, a day.  Hell, we moved a 30 foot tall mobile pyramid in and out of the stage.  We worked our asses off.  Our "down" time, as spotters, was actually when they were playing the games.  That was the fun part, and when we got to rest a bit.  

So that's a little bit about how I wound up stumbling from the BMX freestyle world onto the crew of a hit TV show.  If you were a fan of the show, check out the documentaries, and Lori's (Ice) podcast, I've listened to five of her episodes, and they've all been really interesting.  While I have a bunch of memories from the show, I doubt I'll write any more posts about it.  I've got a lot of other stuff I'd rather write about these days.  All of the sudden there's all this other content about the show, so check out any of it that sounds interesting at the links above.  

As of late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack.  Check it out:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Punk in Drublic documentary

Just watched the Punk in Drublic festival documentary on YouTube. Really cool if you're an old punker. I'm having trouble trying to embed it on the library computer, so you'll have to go find it if interested. Like most people who got into punk, I guess, I was always one of those kids who just didn't seem to fit in the world. Punk rock was a place where all the weird kids found a community of other weirdos. And that was a cool thing. Out of that intellectual and creative weirdness came the DIY movement. The world doesn't want to make the songs, magazines, records, videos, or events you want to see? Do It Yourself. So we did, each in our own ways. 40-45 years later, that spirit is still alive. Cool beans.

CryptoArt Revolution documentary (Sept. 2021)

This recent documentary about the NFT/CryptoArt movement is only a couple months old, which is good in this fast moving movement.  The New York company Adorama put this out, and it's a very well produced, solid overview of what the NFT (Non Fungible Token) technology has made possible in the art world.  If you're an artist, photographer, writer, or musician who wants to learn more about what NFT's are, and how they're being used in art so far, check this doc out.  It's under an hour long, and a great place to begin learning.

For those of you who know this blog as an Old School BMX blog, mostly, you've noticed that I'm suddenly writing all about this "NFT thing."  Yeah, I started diving into learning about this technology a couple of weeks ago, seeing if there is something in it for small time artists, like me.  I'm still going hard with the research. 

Yes, when you google "NFT's," most of what initially pops up are the crazy prices paid for JPEG's or PNG's of pixelated zombie looking things, funny apes, and Beeple's $69 million auction price for a digital collage called "The First 5,000 Days."  I just found another article about Christie's Auction house selling over $100 million in NFT art this year.  Really.  And none of these art NFT's are tangible.  It's fucking weird.  That's the crazy side of the NFT/crypto art movement.  

But is there anything in this technology for a typical Esty-type artist, photographer, writer, musician, or designer?  Yes, I'm glad to say there is.  Here are the basics I've learned so far.

One: NFT's are a digital file tied to a blockchain transaction, which gives proven ownership.  That little thing is the magic.  It makes that one (or a series) of pieces of digital art rare.  And in art, rare stuff can sell for higher prices.  

Two: Pretty much any digital file of art, photo, video, writing, or music, (up to 30 megabytes, I think), can be "minted" into an NFT. 

Three:  This whole movement came out of the high tech/gaming/crypto world, which means there's a fucking shitload of money around NFT's and crypto art.

Four:  The price of entry is to 1) get some crypto, Ethereum in particular in an exchange, 2) open a wallet, and 3) join one of the marketplaces, like OpenSea, Axie, Super Rare, Rarible, Nifty Gateway, Foundation, or the others that exist. Then 4) Most important, do a whole bunch of research to learn about how things work.  Google or YouTube your questions, and dive in.  

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, (who dropped a series of  10,000+ NFT's called Vee Friends, in May), says to do your "50 hours of initial research" on any new thing.  Then decide if it makes sense for you, or not.  That's real good advice.  

Five: Take a piece of your creative work on a digital file, and "mint" it into an NFT, which takes services fees and a "gas" (blockchain) fee, and show it off in the marketplace you chose.  

If you do that, will your artwork NFT sell?  Probably not.

Like selling art and creative work anywhere, you, or someone, still has to PROMOTE and MARKET your work to gain interest, and get sales.  If you already have a following, you need to see if any of them are into NFT's already.  Most average people are not.  It's still a very new and emerging thing.  

If you don't have a following, you need to begin building one.  The main market for small creator NFT's  (and the big series drops) may be a few of your current patrons, but more likely will be a whole lot of "traders" or "flippers."  These people are buying and flipping NFT's like day traders in the stock market, or sports card/collectible traders.  They want to find new projects that have potential to grow, and they want to buy your NTF's CHEAP!  Cheap is $150 to $200, maybe $300, or less in NFT land.  These traders want to buy into your work, and resell it quickly for a 10X or 20X gain, that's 10 or 20 times what they paid for it.  

So if your NFT costs you $80 to mint, and you sell it for $150 to a trader, that trader wants your work to get popular, and take off, they're in it to make money.  They want to resell your NFT art for $ 1,500 or more (paid in Eth aka Ethereum, usually).  In this scenario, you, the artist, make $70, the trader makes, $1350, and a bunch of traders learn you exist, and will pay more attention to your next pieces minted.

To most artists, that sounds like a shitty deal.  And for one piece, it is.  But if you continue, and you do multiples of you pieces, (a series of 3, 10, 50, 100), then you can begin to make some decent money on future NFT's.  That's the basic idea.  Yes, it's possible you could do a series, and they could get noticed and take off quickly.  But more likely, you'll have to spend a bunch of time online promoting your work to people who have a sports card trader mentality. 

So if you want to jump into NFT's and sell one NFT of your epic painting for $5,000, that's not going to happen.  Unless your physical paintings already sell for that kind of prices, then it might.  Most small time artists, I think, will either try selling NFT's, and fail, because they aren't willing to do the marketing or promotion necessary.  Then they'll post somewhere saying "NFT's suck!" and stay on Etsy or in their own Shopify store selling pieces.  Hey, that's fine, NFT's are not for everyone.  

The artists and creators who are willing to sell for low prices in the beginning, to do steady promotion, and build a following over time, have a much better chance of success somewhere down the road.  For people willing to learn this world, and do the work, there's a good chance of being able to create whatever you want to create, and make decent money at it, at some point.  There are a lot of people from the crypto world doing this already, it seems.  That's the upside of the NFT/crypto art scene, as far as I can tell at this point.  When somebody's art NFT's take off, they freakin' LAUNCH.  Ask Beeple.  But his "5,000 days" collage of sketches took him 13 1/2 years to compile.  So he definitely paid his dues. 

So that's what I've learned so far.  If you're willing to seriously market your creative work, NFT's may be really cool for you over several months time.  If you're the typical artist that just puts a piece or two  out there, puts two Instagram links, and hopes to make big money, don't waste your time with NFT's.  I hope this was helpful for some of you.

Oh, and Twitter and Discord are the main social media platforms for NFT/crypto art.  I'm on Twitter: @steveemig43 .