‘Deadliest Warrior’ preps for bloodier second season

March 24, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

Inside the downtown warehouse where the second season of “Deadliest Warrior” is in production, an impaled ballistics gel dummy — complete with phony blood-filled organs — slowly slides down a towering wooden stake.

The grisly snaillike movement, almost invisible to the human eye, is meticulously captured by a super-fast high-speed camera.

“This is the most gruesome thing I’ve seen on the show,” says Dr. Armand Dorian, an emergency room doctor who serves as the show’s medical expert. “It’s a 9-foot pole going through someone’s rectum all the way out through their clavicle. That’s pretty bad. Having said that, I have seen similar impalements in real life. Nothing purposely done, of course.”

It’s just another gory day on the set of Spike TV’s popular hypothetical fighting show, which mixes science, history, fantasy and gore to hypothesize the results of make-believe matchups between real-life combatants. On one rainy winter day last month, gnarly Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler and meticulous Chinese general Sun Tzu were on the fight roster.

While the show’s science and technology may be complicated, the premise is absurdly simple: Who would reign in a fight between, for example, a pirate and a knight? The real winner seems to be Spike. The first season averaged an admirable 1.8 million viewers and was the testosterone-laden cable network’s best-selling series on downloadable platforms last year.

“You’ve got gadgets, tidbits of history and medicine, and you’ve got carnage,” says Geoffrey Desmoulin, the show’s resident biomedical engineer who also holds a black belt in karate.

With a surprising triumph of a first season, Spike moved faster than Vlad’s preferred method of execution to extend the series beyond its made-for-TV concept, spinning it off into the online round-table show “Deadliest Warrior: The Aftermath” and later launching the “Deadliest Warrior: Defend and Conquer” tower defense game for the iPhone.

The almost instantaneous franchise will soon add “Deadliest Warrior: The Game” to the ranks. The downloadable brawler for the Xbox 360 allows gamers to create their own battles with a selection of ancient warriors.

The second season premiere episode, which pits the United States’ SWAT force against Germany’s GSG-9 squad, is not expected until April 20. In the meantime, the network appeased fans’ appetite for destruction by unveiling two second-season matches — Atilla the Hun vs. Alexander the Great and Nazi SS vs. Viet Cong — to the “Warriors’ Den,” the official online fan group.

The other familiar and not-so-famous assailants battling in the second season include Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior, Jesse James Gang vs. Al Capone Gang, Persian Immortal vs. Celt, Roman Centurion vs. India’s Rajput Warrior, Somali Pirate vs. Medellin Cartel, KGB vs. CIA, Ming Warrior vs. Musketeer, Comanche vs. Mongol and Navy Seal vs. Israeli Commando.