It might be that people would think I’m nuts for this one since The Deadliest Warrior on Spike TV was kind of a short-lived series that started going off the rails quickly. But any chance to make a movie or a series out of this would be insanely awesome since pitting warriors from different eras against one another has opened a few eyes and should be able to generate a few ideas. To be certain there were times when the show didn’t seem to take in certain aspects of the warriors that might trump their opponent, but at the same time it opens up a wide array of creative pathways for a movie or proper TV series that could be a lot of fun, especially if it took on a type of Westworld theme with notable differences. In fact some people might claim that this could be the only way that the idea would benefit, but if you have half an imagination there are a lot of different ways it could go.
Just using the Westworld theme though could be interesting since without getting into the whole story line and theme of the park it could almost be something akin to a sporting event in which various warriors from different eras are brought together to compete against one another almost in the same type of death match that has been played out so many times on the show. The inner workings of a script would need to be fleshed out and of course the ethical qualities would need to be looked at more than once but in the act of making a movie or a TV series out of this it would seem that Deadliest Warrior could be something interesting that people might want to watch for at least a season or two. After all they did manage to bring quite a few different warriors across many timelines that were quite interesting to see. Not all the results were as favorable as some might have liked, for example the representatives for the Maori in the Maori vs. Shaolin Monk episode weren’t all that pleased, nor were the Viking representatives that saw the Norse warrior go down to the Japanese samurai. But the beauty of this show is that so many simulations were run that each warrior only managed to win a percentage of the time, meaning few if any ever won all the time. That would make sense really given the Pirate vs. the Knight episode in which many people thought that the pirate should have been easily dispatched.
One thing that would need to be worked on would be the range of weapons that were available for each fighter since the show only focused on four main weapons per fighter. Plus, the idea that some of the fighters operated best in groups wasn’t really shown since a Roman Centurion vs. a Rajput warrior might usually favor the Rajput simply because Centurions might have been tough but they were trained to fight as a unit as well as individuals, and tended to use their fellow soldiers for support quite often. Thus it might be best to think of a way to incorporate a group of soldiers when needed and focus on a single individual when possible, such as the William Wallace vs. Shaka Zulu fight. Much like the show the results would be entirely subjective since those that back each fighter are thoroughly convinced that their choice of fighter would win because of this or that, but in a movie or series setting it might be even more meaningful and be able to show a different dynamic that didn’t depend so much on statistics and would give each fighter a chance to combat one another on neutral ground. As Mike Reynolds of Multichannel mentions there were plenty of questions after each episode. If you ever watched the show you’d notice that a lot of times the landscape chosen favored one fighter or the other and hardly ever put them in neutral territory. But it’s important to note that being on familiar ground didn’t help every fighter.
The reason for pushing this show comes largely from the fact that it was a good idea at the time it was unveiled, but it went off the rails a little too quickly when season three came around and things started getting a bit out of hand. Learning battle tactics and how an army moved on the battlefield was all well and good, but this was warrior against warrior or squad against squad and as a result the tactics were usually to survive and be a better fighter, or better equipped, than the other person. Creating a type of death match movie or show based on this idea would be great largely because it would be a pure action movie and wouldn’t need to take itself too seriously.
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