User blog:CaliforniaKingsnake/The Best and Worst of: Robot Wars looks

A long time ago I did two blogs ranking the Series 9 and the Series 10 competitors by looks, and thanks to TG's blog ranking names in heats, I thought it'd be a fun contest to do the same with the looks of robots.

Before we begin, keep in mind that how good or bad a robot looks is purely subjective and so there are bound to be some disagreements, but that's what the comments are for. I'll also be listing all-time great looking robots and all-time worst-looking up here. Best will be Bold Italics and worst in Bold only, with all timers in both categories being put in all-caps.

All-Time Greatest:
 * ROADBLOCK
 * RECYCLOPSE

All-Time Ugliest:
 * ELVIS

Series 1

 * Heat A: The first ever heat of Robot Wars and already there are 3 classic looks on display, the first appearance of the red spotty fur on Nemesis, some would say Killertron is a classic look if they prefer S1-4, but nobody can deny the iconic look of ROADBLOCK. Whichever producer told them to keep the road sign look should be given a medal since without their input this classic design would be lost. In terms of worst though the other half aren't great lookers. Tough choice but I'm going to give it to Grunt, the superbly elongated wedge never really appealed to me, not to mention all the random gubbins at the top of the robot.
 * Heat B: It's funny, the robot called Uglybot is not the robot in this heat I'd consider the ugliest. Granted, it's not a very pleasing to look at machine, but in my opinion Scrapper is much uglier than Uglybot or Detonator. In terms of best, while Mortis is here it's not gotten its more iconic look yet, so the clear winner has to be RECYCLOPSE. In the same way Roadblock did, Recyclopse actually took its name and designed perfect aesthetics to go alongside it.
 * Heat C: From two very great heats in terms of looks variety, this one is just bland. Worst is a clear winner for Robot the Bruce since it is literally just a box with no colour, hard to root for a robot that is that bland-looking. In terms of the best-looking however it was very close between Plunderbird 1 and my (almost certainly controversial) winner Wedgehog. While name did not match aesthetics even slightly (except the wedge shape I guess), the sleek black colour scheme combined with the yellow chevrons made for a very pleasant-looking design
 * Heat D: This one was fairly easy to pick out, the ugliest design being Krayzee Tokyo. I know Cunning Plan is just two wedges and the Demolisher had that ugly lip, but Krayzee just looks worse than both of them. The best-looking was a clear winner in SAT'arn. Once again the sleek black design made the other colours used really pop.
 * Heat E: In comparison, this heat was tough to pick since all the robots had at least some charm to them, there was no clear ugliest and prettiest at first. After a lot of thinking, I decided that Wharthog was the ugliest robot here with my win going to the similarly shaped Full Metal Anorak. This was really a demonstration as to why colours are important when designing a robot. FMA's sleek silver with the splash of red for the mouth works while in comparsion Wharthog's yellow to be used with the face design does lose me a little and the spikes that you knew wouldn't work just made it worse.
 * Heat F: It should come as no surprise to anyone that my ugliest design here goes to ELVIS. While the bodyshell is okay, it would be much better if it was actually on the robot fully, as such this is the first all-time ugly robot on the blog. Best-looking was tougher, since when it was finished Prince of Darkness looked nice, Eubank the Mouse had some charm, but at the same time I found myself drawn to Skarab more than the others. The colours popped nicely with the red backdrop the series had and the black lower half of the robot made those colours more emphasised.