Someone has recently uploaded every episode of the original Gladiators series
Loved this show as a kid. Wish it lasted longer
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“John, you lost. Was that your plan?”
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Remember when people used to rip on Vulcan and called him Dishlex?
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Reads more like the Full Frontal parody 
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I can see why Mike Hammond stepped in, for some reason I thought it ran longer than 3 seasons and I never knew Hammond and Whitney weren’t there the whole time either.
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Loved the show as a kid. The 2008 revival went alright too, esp with ex-NRL referee Bill Harrigan as the show’s referee and ex-Carlton AFL player Anthony Koutoufides one of the Gladiators.
I’m the same, I just assumed Whitney was always the referee and Hammond and Joseph the hosts. Maybe I just missed the first series, but it felt like it was on TV for years
Clearly master tapes that have been uploaded - hope that these don’t disappear as soon as they are noticed by a wider audience.
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Oh my word - this is awesome! Been watching this for the past hour.
How on Earth did they obtain these master tapes??
The unaired pilot is there too! 
Oh the memories.
My Mum used to drag my sister and I to church every Saturday night whilst Dad (athiest) stayed home and I used to get so annoyed that I always missed half of Gladiators until one night i just flat out refused to go to Church anymore - haha this was the show that made me lose my religion, never to return. LOL!
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Had the best Opening Song I reckon.
I was certainly a sucker for this as a young’un - the remake a decade and a half later didn’t really do it for me, although they at least didn’t ham up the fake noir suspense like the US and especially UK remakes around that time did, which I felt was a smart move - the most you got was Bill Harrigan playing up the NRL-style “video ref” thing.
And yeah, Pedersen as host and John Alexander as ref was only for the first season (possibly also for the Ashes series in-between series 1 and 2 but I can’t recall entirely since it would’ve been shared with the UK hosts and ref). A much younger Tony Schibeci being the VO throughout.
John Forsyth as “assistant ref” had a lot more to with it than met the eye - searches on Google point to things like creating training programs for bodyguards and the like off-air even these days, and as far as I could read he was involved behind the scenes with training both the Gladiators and probably evaluating the potential challengers. Did the occasional episode as front ref, but obviously they wanted a celeb ref in front, hence JA and Whitney. As far as I know he reprised that role in 2008 too.
This show inspired me (and hopefully countless others) to run up shopping centre “downward” escalators emulating the travelator finale from the eliminator 
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This morning during an outside broadcast on KIIS 101.1 in Melbourne, Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips took calls from listeners after it was revealed on Tuesday that Gladiators were being revived for the second time. A lady called Lourene called in and identified herself as Glacier (Lourene Bevaart) from season 3 of the 1995 show on Seven. She said she won season 2 in 1996 and was invited by the producers to join the OG cast the following year. Lourene said that she still has her costume and she and her two teenage daughters often sit together to watch videos of the OG show. She said she’s still friends with some of the cast members and had had several reunions already.
Before Lourene’s phone-in, a guy called and said he was trained by Condor (Alistair Gibb) who was a finance manager for a Toyota dealer in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
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Would love to see Gladiators revived for a third time; from memory I think the 2008 revival rated reasonably but only lasted one season.
Question is - where would you fit it into Seven’s schedule? Saturdays before/after the AFL season would be one option…
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The second revival is being discussed in New Formats thread.
It has been reported that Seven is not interested and Gladiators is going to 10.
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Some things belong in 1996 and I think Gladiators is one of them, along with Bill Clinton, aliens invading the White House and the Macarena.
Best theme songs!
If there’s one thing that certainly brought the original UK Gladiators and its spawn out of the very bare-bones that the American version was, certainly things like the incidental music that LWT commissioned over there helped! (And the local production did pretty well with our own theme too.)
Still think Seven read the room on how to style the '08 series here compared to the US and UK revivals, but even considering that was a bit of a nostalgia era in the 2000s (Hey Hey getting new eps) it just felt a bit like going through the motions (no-one was going to get big on it given how much of it was a vehicle for Bill Harrigan and Kouta…) and it was probably better left on the shelf after one series.
I guess given another UK revival has been filmed (and waiting to go to air), the interest in getting something local is unsurprising. They may have to choose their target audience wisely, the fact that I’m not as enthusiastic about any revivals as my 10-year old self was about the original back in 1995 probably says something! 
which is why Ten might be a good choice if it sells.
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