Ten Years Of Robotic Mayhem (Special Interest)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Main Program: B-

 

 

Before all the robot battle shows started to turn up, the idea was most restricted to those in the 1970s until their advent and whatever they did was ignored.  Ten Years Of Robotic Mayhem focuses on the bets of what the “Survival Research Laboratories” have been up to since 1979, in was has been creative, wild, bizarre and innovative.  It is like the last group of techno-driven creative people pushing robotics before the subject is overtaken by universities, corporations and filmmakers.

 

What may seem ragtag on the surface has a Punk Rock attitude practically, will turn out in the long run to be some of the most interesting and even remarkable machines that have practically their own raw personality.  This is actually more of an expression of the artists making them then they may even realize, but it is still better than some cookie-cutter machine that offers predictability.

 

This single disc offers in excess of two hours of video footage, expanded further by audio commentary on some of the shows.  One thing the shows combine to offer, as much as many companies would like to not admit, is the spirit of risk and innovation that made America what it is to begin with.  That thinks have become so stagnated that corporations fear anyone doing this kind of thing on their own because it might even accidentally create an innovation they do not own is extremely liberating onto itself.

 

The full frame image is usually of very dated, yet priceless video footage going back to the old pre-camcorder days.  This is very diverse in quality like a documentary, but is all about the battles and occasional art pieces, like the nearly 13-minutes-long A Bitter Message Of Hopeless Grief.  Just about all the programs have such complicated, pessimistic titles, but the content is king, so the titles seem meant to throw off the viewer and/or make the actual content more hip.  The sound is PCM 2.0 on the main program and commentaries, but the latter is unusually weak.  A Bitter Message Of Hopeless Grief is offered in an audio-only section (with video, though) in a 5.1 mix that is nothing to write home about, but offers more .1 bass sound.  The extras are equivalent to the main program, but are too complicated and numerous to explain, except that the six films have multiple access points, there are ten biographies of those behind the SRL labs and makes this well rounded.

 

For the record, those individuals singled out are Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert, Eric Werner, Jon Reiss, Leslie Asako Gladsjo, Mike Dingle, Nico Panigutti, Leonard Levy, Liz Young and Nathaniel Field.  Remember those names.  Industrial design is slowly working it sway into DVD and entertainment beyond being incidental as special effects.  Along with The Way Things Go and The Films Of Chris Cunningham, both also reviewed elsewhere on this site, Ten Years Of Robotic Mayhem is another addition to what could be forming a new subgenre of the special interest category and is definitely worth experiencing.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo