In 1989, a reality game show exploded onto our fuzzy CRT television screens: American Gladiators. Today, we have two documentaries that excavate the relics of this cartoonish spectacle, thrusting its tale of muscular men and women in singlets rolling around in big metal balls and hitting each other with pugil sticks back into the limelight. In yet another long moment of national crisis and economic flux, it's fitting that we're revisiting an era when many of us began to awake from the American dream into a much cheaper and tawdrier reality.
The American Gladiators Documentary, a three-hour film produced under ESPN's 30 for 30 and directed by Ben Berman, focuses our attention on series creator Johnny Ferraro, an Elvis impersonator-turned-TV producer from Erie, Pennsylvania, and his allegedly duped partner “Apache” Dann Carr. Carr, who remains something of a mystery until the latter stages of the film, has had an outsize impact on the world of sports entertainment. The retired union worker and arm wrestling champion already had a major role in Showtime’s 2017 documentary Tough Guys, which describes how he, Bill Viola, and Frank Caliguri pioneered MMA in Pittsburgh in 1970s, and old footage in The American Gladiators Documentary shows how closely the hit TV show resembled the games Carr staged for union workers in Erie in the early 1980s.
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