They rolled around in metal spheres, knocking each other silly. Muscle-bound, spandex-clad specimens with comic book names - Nitro! Gemini! Zap! - competed with contestants in challenges that could scarcely be called sports. Viewers of a certain age will remember Gladiators, which ran from 1989 to 1996 and was for a time the most popular syndicated series on television. This is a witty, mischievous, inventive but ultimately quite sad work, a worthy entry in ESPN’s enduring and consistently intelligent doc series. Director Benjamin Berman turns what was widely derided as barbaric spectacle into fodder for postmodern tragicomedy. This question lingers over the new two-part ESPN 30 for 30 film The American Gladiators Documentary, whose simple title intentionally belies a story rife with irony and wickedly sharp turns that ends up interrogating the filmmaking process itself. Ferraro is the creator of the much-mocked, absurdly popular proto-reality-TV competition series American Gladiators. He has a way of looking at the camera like he wants to strangle it, or at least spit on it. Johnny Ferraro comes across like a Mafia soldier in witness relocation as a used car salesman, or maybe that one casino employee you really don’t want to mess with.
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