Jason Dante Bardis is a former BattleBots judge who held the role from World Championship IV until the end of BattleBots: Champions. Throughout his tenure, he was always joined by Lisa Winter and Derek Young.
Bardis previously competed in the show, best known for winning the Season 3.0 and 5.0 lightweight championships with Dr. Inferno Jr., as well as entering heavyweights Towering Inferno and The Disk O' Inferno.
He and Christian Carlberg collaborated during several early projects, such as Slugger during the Las Vegas 1999 event. Following through the year of 1999 during a LEGO Mindstorms event, they created a short promo video to document their fighting LEGO bots: the Infernolab's 2A and Team Coolrobots' Dreadnought. More bots were built single-handedly by Jason throughout 1999, The Missing Link and Dr. Inferno Jr. following. After several wins and losses, an assembled team made up of his brother Byron, his girlfriend Lauren Herold, and other members took the pits from Seasons 1.0 to 3.0. The majority of the bots made public TV appearances such as UPN's Grown Ups sitcom, the KCAL news with The Missing Link and Slugger, and Movies for Guys who like Movies with Dr. Inferno Jr. and Towering Inferno.
In 2016, when Jason's two young children had gotten older, he and Richard Loehnig put together a team for the BattleBots reboot. They built The Disk O’ Inferno, a 250lb disk and lifter robot based on his 120lb robot Disko Inferno, which had a very similar design. Realizing that competing required more time, money and energy than he could invest into competing, Jason would not compete again after World Championship II. He was initially asked about the possibility of judging ahead of the 2018 season, but Jason was too busy.[1] He instead took up a judging role ahead of the 2019 season, where he remained for three full seasons and both spin-off series.
However, as of World Championship VII, Jason Bardis will no longer be a judge for BattleBots. In September 2022, he stated that it was a decision made by Discovery themselves, though the details of this are not confirmed.[2]
"I won't be attending after all. Discovery decided they didn't want to invite me back, and they'll replace me. Oh well. That's show business. It was good while it lasted. At least I'll have lots of time with my family, time to work on projects, catch up on chores, etc." - Jason Bardis via email.
It was later revealed that the vacant judging role would be taken by former guest judge and Mouser Mecha-Catbot builder Fon Davis.
Outside BattleBots[]
He was born and raised in Ottawa Hills near Toledo, Ohio in the 1970s, where he mostly grew up with Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, LEGO, Zoids, and Erector Sets. His parents and older brother, Byron Galen Bardis were in Florence, Italy, visiting the house of the famous poet, Dante Alighieri. His brother, three years old at the time, hit upon the idea that his forthcoming baby brother should be named Dante.
Two decades later, Bardis earned a Project Analyst position at PTCG, a Boston-based company that wrote big huge software that trucking companies used to schedule and route their trucks. While in Boston, he caught wind of early Robot Wars events in San Francisco, but believed he could not afford to travel or build for the competition. Having had enough of the "real world" and "snow," he traversed across the country to escape back to college for more degrees, this time at UCSB. Brushed up on his French, he landed a job in Capellen, Luxembourg, employed at Les Laboratoires Des Spécialités Du Dr. Ernst's Tisanes where he taught employees how to use computers and set in motion the automated revamping of their manufacturing line of medicinal herbal teas.
Christian Carlberg helped him with a couple of movie special effects jobs over his school breaks. Bardis designed a fiber optic lighting system for those mean and nasty Borgs in Star Trek: First Contact and he machined a mountain of internal parts for those mean and nasty mutated cockroaches in Mimic.
His first robot build, Rampage, was constructed on a shoestring budget in collaboration with his fellow classmates from UCSB's Mechanical Engineering department. It performed poorly in a featherweight rumble during Robot Wars 1996 where the bot was later upgraded and renamed to Bot will Eat Itself. It performed better than it's previous predecessor during Robot Wars 1997, save for some minor damage. His 1997 summer job related directly to his research as a lab technician in McDonnell Douglas' Long Beach composites prototyping area.
He was also a brief competitor on Season 1 of Robotica with Mini Inferno, which had much less success.
Reddit AMA Bio[]
Jason Bardis' first robot combat event was Robot Wars 1996, in which he entered Rampage, an awkward double-saw, double-wedge sheet metal box filled with the guts from his Tamiya Frog RC buggy that he got in junior high. (In grade school, he used to use Tomy Rascal and Acrobot wind-up robots to knock down towers of dominoes with his best friend.) It stopped working the first time it bumped into another robot. Jason was in graduate school at the time, where he had convinced the Mechanical Engineering department to give him keys to the machine shop to be an after-hours supervisor (“I’ll build robots, I’ll keep an eye on the undergrads building their projects, and the staff won’t have to work evenings and weekends! Everybody wins!”) and to give him and other students a small budget for that competition.
After that modest beginning, and after a few only-slightly-less-modest years of building bots, he realized that his path to bot stardom would not lie in actually winning fights, so he dressed up his team in flashy outfits and built Dr. Inferno Jr., figuring he could appeal to kids and gain audience sympathy when he lost. Despite his intentions, Dr. Inferno Jr. wound up winning two Giant Nuts as well as finding success in end of season rumbles too.
Following the show's cancellation from Comedy Central, Jason Bardis (now "Dr. Jason") leveraged the invaluable network of bot builder colleagues to take turns working with each other in various interesting jobs, where he contributed to: two robotic arms and two cameras for Mars exploration missions, dancing multimedia fountains for Vegas casinos, antennas on passenger aircraft that let you read Reddit on your flights, a mobility scooter for the elderly or disabled, high efficiency brush and brushless motors, movie special effects, and creative development for The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius TV show.
Trivia[]
- In between BattleBots seasons, Jason likes taking his safer, smaller robots to schools, daycares, libraries, and scout meetings to give talks and demos to young people to get them interested in mechanical engineering.
- Jason came up with the name "Dr. Inferno" while being a grad student at UCSB. His first name, Jason, is Greek for Doctor while his middle name "Dante" derives from Italian poet and critic, Dante Aligheiri, who wrote about the Divine Comedy, which includes a trip to the Inferno.
- Dr. Inferno was Jason's radio DJ title during his college days.
- Bardis used inspiration from the toys he played with during his childhood to build more robots.
- At a young age, he would construct model cars and planes and then melt them after he got bored with them. His brother taught him how to just soften up the parts with a match instead of burning them, so he could deform the car doors and hoods and such and make them look all dented up.
- Then there was the time that Jason emptied the remnants of gas from the lawnmower for winter storage (his parents told him to do this) and decided to empty it on the driveway then light it. He was surprised by how much fire and smoke so little gas can produce.
- As a novice skater, Jason used to own a Powell Peralta Skull and Sword deck before it was stolen from his car during a rock concert. He later bought a used board from a friend but it turned out to be too big for him.
- Besides skating, Jason is also a novice Scuba diver. He took a class, trained at a Scuba school, and got his certification for fun, diving once or twice at Catalina Island in southern California with his friends.
- During his journey to obtaining his PhD for seven years, Jason worked with many different companies focusing on composite materials and project designs, one of them being the Mars Phoenix rover arm for NASA.
- Jason's other hobbies besides robotic combat include: swing dancing, classic video games and pinball machines, racing go-karts, working on his cars and his home, playing with LEGO and learning French.
- Followed by one of his hobbies, he has a huge desire for arcade and pinball machines, one of them earning his title as an internationally ranked pinball player from Orange County, CA.
- Besides the Infernolab, he was also on Heisenberg Racing, an autocross team in 2009 that championed 13th place from a major event with Erwin, an upbeat 1991 BMW 318is.
- Jason's faviourite Marvel Avenger is Capitan America, according to his 2016 San Diego Comic Con album where he posed with Cap's shield while standing in a replicated LEGENDS box.
- His favorite fruit are bananas, as he is seen snacking on them once in a while during a BattleBots reboot match.
- Besides his personal robot music playlist, he also favors Japanese music, bands such as Shonen Knife, Pizzicato Five, and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra.
See Also[]
- Team Infernolab website
- Infernolab's Youtube channel
- Infernolab Facebook Page
- His UCSB Engineering site (archived)
- Jason's profile on Heisenberg Racing
References[]
- ↑ https://youtu.be/6PkThuoAeec?t=595
- ↑ Private Gmail conversation between Falco276 and Jason Bardis.