Anybody watching the new series Warriors on Spike

[Birka]

The next episode is Vikings vs. Samauri. Hope they get this right. Here is a preview.

http://www.spike.com/video/samurai-killers/3147101

[Beorn]

Looks good. It's always exciting to see mainstream telly take an interest in our history and promote it towards tv land.

Top choice for the voice over, too.

[Birka]

Looks good. It's always exciting to see mainstream telly take an interest in our history and promote it towards tv land.

Top choice for the voice over, too.

When I click on the "voice over" link, I get the not found page. I am interested in whatever you linked. Could you try it again?

[Birka]

Looks good. It's always exciting to see mainstream telly take an interest in our history and promote it towards tv land.

Top choice for the voice over, too.

Now the link opened. I did not know that David Wenham was an Aussie. This show airs tonight at 10:00 pm, EDT, but the Spike channel will replay it quite a bit afterwards. I also think it will be available on the Spike Channel site to download.

[Aemma]

It looks interesting Birka. I have a couple of friends that would be interested in this so I'll pass it along. I'm not sure if the Canadian Spike Channel will carry it though. I'll need to research it. It looks like an interesting premise for a show though...and educational too.

Thanks and cheers Birka!...Aemma

[Galloglaich]

I've been watching it. In a variety of ways the show is great, but in others...not so much. I think the premise is intriguing, but flawed. In some ways it signifies exactly what is wrong with our age. The modern mind seems to have a great need to empirically validate and quantify everything. This is all well and good and quite the valuable tool when kept in the proper perspective, but there are just too many intangible factors when applied to combat. How the hell do you quantify Berserkergang?

As far as the clip in question goes, I'm very excited to see the show, but I'm prepared for a disappointment. What is up with the Frank Frazetta weapons on the rack (-2:37)? I'm also afraid they're going to characterize the matchup as the Vikings' "mindless brute force" vs. the Samurai's "speed and skill" sets. Certainly, force, skill, and speed-along with the WILL, are factors that individual warriors of either culture would possess in varying balance. To make broad generalizations either way might make for interesting television, but we won't really gain any meaningful knowledge from such an exercise. I'm not too encouraged by the demeanor of the guys in the clip. As someone who has studied Western (and Eastern) martial arts for years, I can say that the Danish great-axe certainly excels at the overhead chop, but I hope they demonstrate the total use of the weapon, and not just the most obvious ones. Perhaps they should have contacted the viking reenactors that appeared on Terry Schappert's show on the History Channel. Those guys seemed to have a better sense of what was up. I'm also fearful that on the samurai side, the infamous katana will be portrayed as some kind of lightsaber capable of shearing through steel girders at the flick of the wrist.

However it turns out, I'll still be watching (and secretly rooting for the vikings)-I can be a sucker for this kind of stuff.

[Birka]

Great post Galloglaich, and that is why I first posted that I hope they get it right. I'm putting my money on the Vikings. up

Here is the link to the History Channel show Warriors, and their episode on the Vikings was very educational.

http://www.history.com/content/warriors/episode-guide

[Galloglaich]

Ok, I'm officially disappointed, but not surprised. If I had to hear about "brains vs. brawn" one more time during that episode I thought I was going to puke. Apparently, despite the fact that we of Northern European ancestry have managed to dominate the world in innovation forever, we are drawn from a pretty stupid lot. I also didn't like the way that the brawn factor was overdone. I'm never going to dispute that the Vikingr would have relied on their sheer physical prowess in battle, but it's not like they weren't proving themselves against other Northern Europeans who shared a gene pool of large, strong individuals.

Rather than go into the multitude of details in which the show was erroneous/skewed (the spear losing for one), I'd just like to point out that this is the second episode in which the European lost to a foreign culture. I suspect PC sensibilities have made it somewhat unacceptable to show Europeans in a dominant position. The irony is that it's the historical dominance of Europeans in the first place that have even made those PC mentalities acceptable in mainstream culture. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

[Birka]

Well, I am now finished with this series on Spike TV. The Warrior series on the History Channel is much better on many levels. In the show, they showed that the sharpest Samurai katana, which did cut through 2 pig carcasses, did nothing against chain mail. Yet when they gave reasons why the Viking lost, they said the Samurai had better armor. The did not even test the Samurai armor, and the Viking armor defeated the best weapon of the Japs, the katana. The Viking weapons would have penetrated Samurai armor, which was mostly lacquered wood.

Another TV show where they are allowed to piss on white, European males, those f@cking multicultural, PC f@cks.

Watch out for the show when they will have Muslim warriors, one will be able to defeat an army of white Europeans.

[Psychonaut]

Yet when they gave reasons why the Viking lost, they said the Samurai had better armor.

Whaa? Japanese armor was mostly made of wood/cloth!? Even their chainmail sucked. Asian chainmail patterns are notoriously loose and ineffective.



Compare that with a standard European 4-in-1 weave: