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

Sessioning Gilligan's Lagoon on my bike

Gilligan's Island intro from season 2 on, I think.  The initial intro was in black & white and was shot in different locations.   If you're part of Generation X, you spent many hours laying on your stomach in the thick, earth tone shag carpet, on the living room floor, elbows out, your head propped up on your hands, watching Gilligan's Island episodes.  At :38 in the intro, and then under the head shots of the cast, we see the familiar sight of the lagoon, as they called it on the show.  The S.S. Minnow is washed up on the sandy beach, big rocks by the holes in the hull.  In many episodes, the castaways went to that little beach, surrounded by trees, for one reason or another.

But that area in the shot isn't really a beach.  It's TV set, which was set up on the back part of the CBS-MTM Studio lot.  Officially, it was, and still is, called CBS Studio Center.  That's what we called it when I got a job as a spotter on American Gladiators in the summer of 1992.  What's a spotter?  On American Gladiators, we were a crew of 8 guys, and most of the time we helped the grips (TV industry construction guys) move set pieces around.  If you watched American Gladiators in the late 1980's and early 1990's, you know there were several different games, where the contenders competed against the gladiators.  Each game had a whole bunch of pieces that had to be moved in from outside, and set up, with a live audience watching.  If you freeze this clip at :24, that's me in the black, in the background on Wesley "2 Scoops" Berry's tower.  Wesley is the single best athlete I've ever met, and a really cool guy as well.

One of the older crew guys told me the Gladiators stage crew did the biggest set changes in the history of TV, and we did them 7 times each day.  I don't know if that was true, but we worked hard on that show.  How many other people you know who've actually moved an entire pyramid, on a daily basis, and that puppy weighed like 22,000 pounds or something.  So a big part of our job was moving heavy things on and off the stage, or Gladiators Arena, as it was called.

We taped the whole season of American Gladiators in about 7 weeks total, in the summer.  Most TV shows shoot for a nine month season, roughly September through May, like a school year. In the summers, nearly everyone was gone, "on hiatus," and we had the whole big lot pretty much to ourselves.  Gladiators was housed in Stage 3, said to be the second biggest sound stage in the whole Hollywood/L.A. area.  The CBS-MTM lot is actually in Studio City, over the hill from the famous Hollywood sign, and a couple miles to the west.  It's off Radford street, near the intersection of Ventura and Laurel Canyon, for you SoCal people.  When I was up in the area recently, people refer to the lot as the Radford Studios these days.

For the first 7 or 8 days of working on set, we would set up the games, usually a couple at once, and both the contenders and gladiators would practice.  Since it was a TV show, and a progressive, competition show, the producers didn't want either the gladiators or the contenders to get hurt.  So us spotters got to play most of the games with them.  As part of our job, we learned to take stunt falls into the crash pads from veteran stuntman Bob Yerkes, who was in his 70's then.  We learned how to fight with pugil sticks from Marine Corps drill sergeants from the San Diego bootcamp You can see me under th eleft tower at 1:01 in that clip).  Then we would be contenders for the gladiators to practice, and gladiators for the contenders to practice.  So I got my ass kicked by both groups, which was pretty fun, most of the time.

Like any big budget TV show, we had an hour for a catered lunch each day, which meant eating cafeteria style, on a smaller stage, and then we had time to chill or wander around a bit.  One day at lunch, someone mentioned the old mill.  I said, "what old mill?  The crew guy said, follow me, check this out.  There was a line of trees behind Stages 1/2, 3 (our stage), and the next couple.  I knew there was a hill below the trees, but never wandered back there.  So I follow this guy into a little cut in the trees, and there's a wooden walkway that went into the back of  wood framed building.  We walked into a bare, empty wooden room, with two windows on the other side.  The guy said, "look out the window." He walked to one, I walked to the other.  Suddenly I was looking out the window of an old fashioned mill, from a second story window.  There was a big mill wheel on the side of the mill, and a pond below.  The pond was surrounded by big asphalt banks, so you could walk around the edge of the pond.  The banks were 6 or 7 feet high, and dropped down to the flat ground of a parking area below.  It looked something like this, from below, when there was no water in the pond.

The main thing the old mill was used for during gladiators was for people to sneak out into it, since it was pretty secluded, and make-out or get a blowjob.  While I never managed to get lucky there, I did wander out there once in a while.  It was a cool set, and right behind our stage.

At the time, I was either living in the P.O.W. House in Westminster, which you old school BMXers know of, or roommates with Chris Moeller and others in one apartment or another, down in Huntington Beach.  Those places were 50 miles away.  I worked 7 days a week on the show, with only 2 or 3 days off in 6 or 7 weeks.  I didn't have a car then.  So I would rent a cheap motel room by the week, which was about a mile and a half away.  I rode my BMX bike, an S&M Dirt Bike, to work each day.  I parked it back stage, and sometimes rode it over to lunch.  One time I gave Ice the Gladiator a ride to lunch on my handlebars.  I was riding by to lunch and she said, "Hey, give me a ride."

Our spotter crew worked pretty hard most of the day, so I didn't have much energy to go session after work.  But  I would occasionally do a few tricks at lunch.  Anyhow, one day I wandered over into the old mill at lunch, looked out the window, and the pond was empty.  Even better, it was a big, banked pool, with 6-7 foot high banks.  There was even a mellow hip.  So after work, I asked someone if anyone would freak out if I rode it a bit.  The people on my crew said, "Probably not."  So I rode down the driveway into the parking area, and rode the big banked pool for half an hour or so.  I loved riding banks back then.  I could do little hip jumps, maybe a foot, foot and a half off the ground, but they were fun.  I did some kickturns, and a bunch of backside bonelesses, a favorite bank trick of mine.  I could to 180 and 360 flyouts onto the top of the bank.  Nothing was insane, but it was a blast to ride.  Best of all, security rolled by in their golf carts, and didn't care.

Over four seasons, I had maybe 8 or 10 solo sessions, in the mill pond after days on the Gladiators crew.  One day one of the guys who worked for the studio itself came by.  "You know that's Gilligan's Lagoon, right?" he asked.  No, I didn't know.  He assured me it was.  The little inlet, to the left of the mill, was where they put the sand, and the S.S. Minnow, to shoot the intro, and other scenes, for Gilligan's lagoon.  So, as far as I know, I was the first, and only, BMXer to ride Gilligan's lagoon banks, while it was dry.  I mentioned that fact in a Facebook comment last weekend.  Much to my surprise, Eddie Fiola responded, saying I shouldn't say I was the only BMXer to session the lagoon banks.  "Don't forget, I work in Hollywood, too," Eddie said.  So it sounds like Eddie found it too, at some point.

According to the CBS Studio Center wikipedia page linked above, Gilligan's Lagoon was demolished, and paved over to make a parking structure, in the mid-1990's.  I last rode it in 1995, I think, my last time working there on American Gladiators, and I know the lower area, by the lagoon, got really built up later on.  I snuck my sister and her friend on the lot a couple years later, while I gave them a tour of Hollywood, and we parked in that area.  I think the lagoon was still there then, maybe 1996 or 1997.  In any case, I think I'm the first BMXer to session Gilligan's lagoon banks, and one of only a couple who ever did.

Jon Peterson, the Haro assistant team manager, who introduced me to the freestyle industry in Tulsa in 1986, also commented on the Facebook post where I mentioned the lagoon.  He said he digs my weird stories, so I wold him I'd write this one up.

I didn't know much about the history of the CBS-MTM lot when I worked there, except that Rosanne taped on Stage 1, next door to our stage.  That was where the Mary Tyler Moore show, the "MTM" in CBS-MTM, taped many years earlier.  But here's a cool little look around the lot with Bob Vila from This Ol' House, a few years later.



I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting going on.  Check them out:

Crazy California 43

 The Big Freakin' Transition

 

Full Circle