Prototype This!
Prototype This! was a TV series that claimed to "look into the viability of gadgets and technology seen in science-fiction movies". The series premiered on October 15, 2008, on The Discovery Channel. It was filmed on Treasure Island in Building 180 and occasionally at Standard Metal Products in San Francisco.
The show follows a team of inventors:
⁕Dr. Mike North – Material Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
⁕Joe Grand – Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Boston University
⁕Terry Sandin – Special Effects Guru, Hollywood
⁕Dr. Andrew 'Zoz' Brooks – 3 degrees from the University of Adelaide, namely, Bachelor of Science, First Class Honours in Computer Science and a Graduate Diploma in Education plus a Masters from the Australian National University's robotics laboratory and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
4c3T@4c3T
I downloaded this, thinking it might be interesting, but soon I realized that this was utter crap!
The whole series concept is like that of many; Time Vs. Tech.
Meaning, there's that deadline and the narrator, as well as the crew keeps you reminded of it. I personally wish that guys like these could just be given a task and complete it in their own time, not having suspenseful music playing, weird cutting and making the viewer nauseated by the nagging time-issue all the time.
Also, why are Americans constantly treating its audience like senile morons? Is it because there are like 500 channels and it's easy to get lost while zapping through the commercial breaks, so that you have to remind them of what they were watching before they got lost 10 minutes ago (from zapping)?
Which is strange, since they do this right before a commercial break, and after they return, they must for some reason re-cap, thus overlapping with scenes from all over the episode.
I felt an unease sensation as I had to fast forward in order to escape this before-/after-thing..
I didn't even make it to the end. If you want to see guys making stuff, I'd advice you to go to YouTube instead, because this is not worth your time, and possibly your mental health.
Stressful, moronic, competition-driven against the clock piece of junk!
Besides, that crew isn't what I'd call experts. Sure, they seem quite competent at what they do, but I think they're not the cutting-edge kind of guys.
To explain that, I'll mention the boxing robots they built:
The design was that of any science school project. Stupid look, poor overall design concept, and weird solutions for both the movements, and sensors for both motion caption as well as "impact" registration (That in particular!).
Anyone with some level of both dignity as well as understanding of the concept at hand would have come up with something better I think.
But, the time allotted might have been the biggest issues and probably the wrench in the whole machinery.
I'd give this series a score of 3 out of 10 for being this kind of series where the main focus is not the actual building and details about it, but more that of competition against time.
This gives nothing for tekkies such as myself, only a sense of disappointment.