I weighed my opinion in on a different thread;
I am of the opinion that most of the reasons that people didn't like it are pretty geeky; to me sounding not much different then D&D players criticizing someone for not understanding the intricacies of the invisibility cloak...
Paul
Yes, I've heard that kind of complaint too. But I think the show had major problems that don't involve MA-geekitude:
(i) this was supposed to be a showcase for a genuinely experimental-science approach to traditional MAs, so we'd understand what was really going on with the actions that MAs do. I teach at Ohio State, one of the biggest jock schools in the country, and you can bet good money that the sports programs here do a lot of computerized imaging of athletes' performance, and use that technology to try to understand just where the shot putter's or discus thrower's or quarter-miler's power is generated and how to tweak the biomechanics of their performance to yield significant improvements. But in `Fight Science', there was this huge disconnect between the elaborate images and the lame or nonexistent explanations of what was going on in different MAist performances, and why. A lot of fancy graphics accompanied by voiceover text that really told us almost nothing about what the graphics were supposed to be showing. `Power comes up from the floor', and sure enough, flashing light works its way up the fighting skeleta from the ground... but what does any of that
mean, in terms of what's really going on physically and biomechanically? Compared with what sports physiology and kinematics research routinely done in, say, Big-10 athletic and sports science departments is showing us, the content of the program was close to zero. It wouldn't have been so bad, if they hadn't had all this state-of-the art equipment, all these superfast cameras and strain guages and everything else that wound up providing little more than special effects.
(ii) They took a bunch of people from different arts, measured (or at least showed) a one-time performance on several metrics, and on that basis blithely announced which martial art was `best' on which metric (speed, impact, etc.) But this is so meaningless---we're always talking about this kind of thing, right? The comparisons show nothing... but here's what's really strange: the TKD guy (one of several `shared between the XMA and NG productions) scored highest on impact force, with a (spinning?) back kick, so the presenters tell you that TKD generates the greatest impact---if I recall correctly, it was on the order of 1600 lbs/sq inch. But on the Discovery Channel XMA special, Matt Mullins, an exponent of Okinawan Karate, lands a front kick that registered on the order of 1800lbs/sq inch---as I recall. You'd think that they would be a little bit more cautious about their interpretation of the data---by their criterion, shouldn't Shito-Ryu, Mullins `home' art, trump TKD---the data that was registered on what people on several different MA threads identified as the same apparatus, used in both the XMA and NG specials? Again, as people noted when `Fight Science' first came out, they didn't even keep the moves they were testing for constant: the Muay Thai guy holds onto the dummy and uses a knee strike as his `kick', which none of the other participants do... at the end of the day, you have a lot of numbers which reflect one-time performances among a number of MAists of very different shapes, weights and sizes, from which no robust conclusions can be drawn. It was such a waste of scientific and technical expertise...
And this doesn't even get into the problems with the weapons stuff...
So the upshot is, more glitz and glitter and virtually no useful information. Neither the general nor the specialist audience learned anything about the science of fighting. I'm not trying to be negative; I really was interested in the program when I saw the adverts for it and I was hoping it would be something more than what I've come to expect from these big-budget TV specials on MAs. I just didn't see anything coming out of the program that measured up even little bit to the claims the presenters were making on the show about what they had accomplished.
