Summertime is no-man’s land for sports fans. We’re fortunate to have a World Cup this year, but there are still no sports to watch after 4:30 p.m. EDT (baseball doesn’t count because nobody has watched an entire baseball game since 2007). Something needs to fill the void. While there may not be many human sports going on this summer, Elon Musk says we will soon live in a posthuman world, so it’s the perfect time to dive into the best posthuman sport: BattleBots.BattleBots is why God invented electricity. Surely the pinnacle of human innovation is a televised March Madness-style tournament in which robot gladiators try to smash, squeeze, slice, and melt their opponents with military-grade weaponry. There are knives and axes and drones with flamethrowers.

Bots that get too close to the walls are smashed by giant hammers. Bots that stay in the middle get skewered by “kill saws” that rise out of the ground like the tigers in Gladiator. It’s everything you imagined doing with power tools as a kid fulfilled by teams of engineers from across the globe.

Those engineers are very, very good at their jobs. To put the bots’ destructive power in perspective, here’s a Battlebot named Tombstone taking on a bowling ball. BattleBots, featured a one-on-one combat tournament, and crowned a champion each season. The series ended in December 2002, but the show maintained a cult following and in 2015 the series was revived by ABC. Many of the original teams re-entered their robots for competition, but with 13 years of additional experience and superior technology, the bots are faster, stronger, and more destructive than ever (in the above clip, the tip of Tombstone’s blade is spinning at 400 miles per hour).Season 8 of BattleBots is ongoing, but the fights from the first two seasons are all online, creating the perfect YouTube rabbit hole to serve as your summertime sports sustenance.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 fights from the revived BattleBots series. This is classic BattleBots: lots of hammer smashing, a one-dimensional robot looking lost in the world, and an old man in a polo trying to fist pump without dropping his remote control. This is an extremely one-sided affair––Overhaul’s strategy is to get a grip underneath the opposing bot, and attack its underbelly, like the in Jurassic World. Unfortunately for Overhaul, Beta is designed to thwart this exact tactic, so Beta spends most of the match thwocking Overhaul in the face. The metal on most bots’ armor is so strong that hammers rarely lead to knockouts, which makes this match even more pleasing when Beta smashes Overhaul’s internal workings into submission.(Also, this match establishes an excellent rule that will hold for the rest of this piece, and probably every BattleBots match ever: The prettier bot always loses. I don’t know why.) No.

Battlesaw's Discovery Season 4 appearance. Battlesaw was a robot from Team Twister Robotics for the second season of the ABC reboot of BattleBots.The team consisted of Adam Cox (Captain and Chief Designer), Seth Cox (Materials), Jason Cox (Electronics), Jeremiah Loder (Pitman), and Chris Humble (Pitman). This month’s activity pages are all about HEXBUG® BattleBots®. Enjoy coloring our mechanical heroes and using your BattleBots knowledge to complete the word search. BattleBots is a great example of how STEM can be fun, creative, and entertaining. Use it as an opportunity to inspire your kids to get involved in robotics and STEM learning.

9: Warrior Clan vs. One of the best parts of BattleBots is how terrifying death machines can be rendered harmless by simply flipping them on their side.

In this matchup between Warrior Clan, which resembles a Roomba attached to an upside-down dustpan, and Nightmare (the one with the giant spinning saw), Warrior Clan tries to use its three smaller minibots to get under Nightmare’s legs and topple it over. When rightside up, Nightmare is a medieval torture device on wheels. On its side, it’s that can’t roll over.

Nightmare dies a pathetic death by flipping itself into the crack behind the screws, but in its brief life it created by blowing one of those minibots to smithereens and landing its blade right into the minibot flamethrower. 8: LockJaw vs.

Styles make fights, and LockJaw and Yeti take the same approach to the sweet science: attack like rabid Honey Badgers. Sparks literally fly when they collide early in the match, but everything turns when Yeti breaks LockJaw’s jaw so its jaw can’t lock (as MythBusters host and ringside judge Adam Savage looks on).Yeti’s spinning drum (basically a music box going really fast) sends LockJaw flying into the glass, and eventually pushes LockJaw into the pulverizer, the screws, and the kill saws (or as the announcer described this moment, “I dont think thats a parking spot Chris!”).

Yeti escaped with the victory, but both robots showed heart. 7: Tombstone vs. Witch Doctor. This is the BattleBots version of Tombstone is the BattleBots GOAT with an official record of 12 wins, one loss, and a trail of, and despair in its wake. So when Witch Doctor came out and began to whoop Tombstone’s 25-horse-powered ass, it wasn’t just a beatdown; it was a sea change.Witch Doctor broke Tombstone’s fearsome blade and sent the bot flying to the other side of the arena, but that’s where everything changed: In doing so, Witch Doctor flipped itself over and landed upside down like a turtle on its back. Tombstone began a victory dance (even with its main weapon flopping on the ground), like the Mountain digging his thumbs into Oberyn’s eyes. Life sucks, and then your robot dies.

Your browser does not support HTML5 video.HyperShock is usually equipped with two robotic arms, but when the team learned that Warrior Clan would be also bringing a drone into the arena (which is allowed, I guess?) they went to a hardware store and bought a rake for $20.“This is our drone smiting device,” the team Yahoo. “It’s good for getting drones out of the sky. It’s also good for leaves.”After HyperShock smacks Warrior Clan’s drone out of the sky (and then back into the sky),it turns its attention back to Warrior Clan. The two chase each other in circles for so long the show should have set the video to.

Finally, HyperShock uses its front weapon to disable Warrior Clan and then sweeps it under the pulverizer hammers to complete the stunning victory. 5: Complete Control vs. Here’s actual exchange between announcers in this video:Announcer 1: “He’s roasting him like a marshmallow, Chris!”Announcer 2: “If so grab the chocolate and the graham crackers, I want some s’mores!”This matchup is chaos at its finest. Within 17 seconds, a drone takes flight, a robot digging a battle axe into a birthday present gets suplexed, and a potted plant (???) gets tossed asunder. I have no idea why a potted plant was mounted on wheels, but there is a story behind the birthday present. In the previous year’s tournament, Complete Control (the one with wheels and fire) beat Ghost Raptor by that exploded on impact.

Nets aren’t technically illegal, but they are highly frowned upon, and the incident caused a kerfuffle in the BattleBots community. Blade of conquest cheat. The following year, Bombshell took a dig at Complete Control by entering this match with an empty gift-wrapped box as a taunt (spoiler: it didn’t work).Complete Control (the claw machine that shoots flames) tries to grab Bombshell (the one with the gift) as Complete Control’s drone (which also shoots flames) hovers overhead. Apparently whoever is at the controls was drunk, because the drone crashes without being touched.

Complete Control clamps onto Bombshell, envelops it like a Venus flytrap, and then lifts it into the air and scorches it with the tenderness of love letter to Prometheus.Bombshell’s battered corpse lands underneath the pulverizer and inches from the gift it brought into the match. BattleBots is poetry. 4 Minotaur vs. Brevity is the soul of knockouts, and Minotaur’s fights are often nasty, brutish, and short. Here Minotaur needs just 20 seconds to decapitate Warhead (should we just say War?). Warhead-less begins stumbling around like a robot chicken with its head cut off, trying to blindly shoot flames in Minotaur’s direction. Minotaur promptly pushes it into the corner, where the pulverizer smashes both of Warhead’s flamethrowers at the same time (!) before Minotaur circles back and topples it over like a ragdoll.

At first glance, No. 3: Bronco vs. Seconds into this match, Bronco launches itself onto the screws, which is the BattleBots version of an It then starts flapping helplessly and eventually launches itself back onto the floor, albeit upside down.

So many bots are often helpless when inverted, but Bronco is able to use its flipper to launch itself through the air like a gymnast, sticking the landing to get back into the fight on its heels.Stinger, a distant cousin of the Transformer Bumblebee, unleashes its flamethrower. As Bronco flees, it runs right over the kill saws rising out of the floor. The only way Bronco could have started this match worse is if it immediately blew up.Then Bronco suddenly flips Stinger—and the match—on its head. The bots hit each other so hard to open the match they spent the next 60 seconds wobbling like Jello.“It’s like they’re trying to regain consciousness!” the announcer yells. “It’s like the end of Rocky II, Kenny!”While we’re waiting for them to recover, I’d like to pause for a moment and appreciate the attention to detail exhibited by Complete Control’s engineering team.

Not for how they built the robot, but for what they wore to this match. ABCThe blueprint design on the collar adds an elegant touch to gladiator chic. Noblemen 1896 play the game in ipod touch 6. The other team showed up in matching polos.Once the bots reawaken, they begin circling each other.

Warhead, which looks like a horseshoe crab trying to fly, gashes two wounds in Complete Control’s armor and then circles back, flame-throwing arms alight. Warhead slices open a third hole in Complete Control’s shell, shoots flames directly into its body, and then is launched backward by the impact. (This seems to happen a lot with Warhead—don’t the engineers know that for every action, there’s an equal-but-opposite reaction?). Minotaur eats the hammers like a hungry hippo, and methodically beats Blacksmith within a millimeter of its life. Minotaur rips off Blacksmith’s front bumper, then the panel protecting the circuitry, then the hammer head itself. To its credit, Blacksmith doesn’t quit.

Even when its primary weapon has been reduced to a chair leg, it (hilariously) stays on the offensive.The only thing better than Blacksmith’s refusal to give up is Minotaur’s driver Daniel Zacarias Freitas doing the before he (mercifully) sets Blacksmith’s chest cavity ablaze.This matchup gave us flaming hammers, massive collisions, and bots shredded to spare parts, but these robots showed something even more important: heart. When the machines rise up, we don’t have a fighting chance.