I’m all for signing this petition to bring back ‘Real Steel’, because it’s so, SO boring and I appreciate that. I used to just have it on in the background while I was doing household tasks, and I could seriously look away from the screen for minutes at a time, look back and nothing had changed in the slightest. They were still just driving down the freeway, driving their truck full of stainless steel bow rails, always driving.
Although I don’t much like the idea of people thinking that stainless steel marine welding is in any way boring, because it happens to be one of the most dynamic industries out there. In fact, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a show all about marine welders. It’d be called…’Extreme Welding: Fire and Water’, and it’d be all about people doing stainless steel welding in some extreme conditions. Instead of extremely long shots of people driving, it’d be all dramatic music and underwater shots of welding, or wherever they happen to be welding because welding in general is just exciting. You’re using fire to stick things to other things. There’s no way that concept could properly fail, unless they gave a panel of judges some scuba equipment and had them make disapproving expressions, underwater, and then there were awful off-set interviews afterwards.
Television is a funny old game like that, though. I know people WOULD love to watch marine stainless steel welding in action, even if it’s as simple as fixing a fishing rod holder (some of those close-ups could be pure art), but they haven’t made the show because…well, competitions are the big thing at the moment. If they can’t show people competing against each other in front of a panel of judges, with melodrama and musical cues when people are ABOUT to say things but they don’t because of the hot dramas, then it doesn’t get filmed.
-Roe