American Gladiators, Hulk Hogan - The 80’s Are Back

As a geek with a DVR I don’t often contemplate the correlation between television and the web. What television show, commercial, movie or even “lower third” doesn’t include a domain name these days. I assumed consumers for the most part get ad blinded when it comes to the domain names as our society rapidly approaches the relentless state of advertising depicted in Minority Report. A quick trip over to Google Zeitgeist (aka Hot Trends) tells a different tale.

On a Saturday morning during college football season nearly half of the top 50 trends were related to football and with Thanksgiving still a not so distant memory a good deal of the other hot searches involved finding creative ways to get rid of the left over turkey. Obviously turkey doesn’t have much to do with television but Stephen King’s The Stand, The Incredibles and Battlestar Gallactica all do. All three of these shows were on television today (don’t tell me how Battlestar ended, I haven’t watched it yet) and all three made their way into the trend results. While watching one of these fine shows live *gasp* I saw an ad for American Gladiators, a rehashed version of an 80’s classic gauntlet style contest where the average Joe contestants take on finely tuned athletes in some very odd physical challenges. Being a huge fan of the original I was sucked in by the ad and thus headed to the web to investigate further.

Some initial probing turned up interesting results. Wikipedia #1 (ugh), YouTube #2 (aah, good times) and the “official” American Gladiators site turned up in the SERPs. Sadly, the only way I found the site for the new show was by adding “NBC” to my query. The NBC American Gladiators site makes me wonder about how dedicated NBC is to making the show a success. Hopefully this post garners some traffic because they will need a lot of television ads to make up for the lack of investment in the site if they plan on getting the show off the ground. Thinking back to the television ad there didn’t seem to be a web address. Maybe NBC is going for an internet disabled campaign this time around. Or maybe they feel they no longer need to promote online with the April launch of Google’s TV advertising division and they are just sticking with the larger television market.

The good news in all this is that Hulk Hogan is co-hosting the new show. The bad news is that not only is Hulk getting divorced but there isn’t anything interesting about the new show on the NBC site. As long as a reporter isn’t responsible for letting Hogan in on the details of the new gladiators show it stands a fighting chance (pun intended).