BattleBots Photos from Nash Bridges

On February 15, 2001, a small group of robot builders from the San Francisco area were invited to the set of CBS's Nash Bridges TV show for the taping of an episode called "Blood Bots" where robots are used to commit crimes.

It was fun, check it out:

Can you believe they hauled half the BattleBox down to the studio just for this? Yep, they set up the arena just for a few shots in the show. here it is, one side is completely open, no wall, so the camera could get a perfect view of the bots inside.

Here's Nightmare getting ready for his shot. He didn't get much actionn in the arena, but did get a pretty good shot fairly close to camera.

In addition to Nightmare, Voltronic, DooAll, and Toro attended this taping.

Here's Voltronic before getting into the arena to go against his 'opponent' for the shots of the battles- Toro- who happens to outweigh him by 1.5 times! Poor Voltronic spent more time in the air than on the ground, thanks to Toro's massive pneumatic flipper.

Here's a quick shot right before they started taping the shot with Nightmare in it. They had him lifted up on the workbench like they were working on him.

The special effects guys flowed some smoke into the arena for that 'eerie' feeling, or maybe that was just Voltronic's batteries smoking....

The Toro crew waits between takes. It was funny how many times the director wanted to see Toro flip Voltronic over! It went like this:

Director: "Yeah, that was great, let's see it again!"

60 seconds and 3 painful flips later:

Director: "Yeah, that was pretty good, now can you try to flip him in this direction? Let's do it again!"

I think there was like 5 takes of slamming before Voltronic's battery shorted out and he couldn't move any more. But I was way impressed at how many flips he was able to withstand. I don't know many robots that could hold up to Toro's power like that!

Flip! Voltronic goes flying, airfare paid in full by Toro....