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The strangest and most cerebral version was the 2002 ABC series The Chair, hosted by John McEnroe, where contestants had their heart rates monitored while answering questions. Mental Samurai is not the first game show to combine trivia challenges with physical ones, of course. I was hoping there’d be some additional level of complication at this point - perhaps a trickier system of stakes and risk, or the introduction of a team element? But the Circle of Samurai is just the Towers of Samurai again, only shorter. If contestants manage to successfully answer the questions of all four towers, they proceed to the Circle of Samurai, where they are still strapped in a robot bucket and given even more trivia to answer.

There is no Tower of How Any of This Relates to a Military Nobility Class of Medieval and Early-Modern Japan. The contestants have five minutes to answer questions from each one: the Tower of Memory, the Tower of Sequence, the Tower of Puzzles, and the Tower of Knowledge. Contestants are strapped inside of the bucket, and then Ava propels them high and low to various towers called the Towers of Samurai. The giant robot arm is named Ava, and although host Rob Lowe says things like, “Meet Ava,” as though we’re all being introduced to a giant robotic personality, it’s just a huge robot arm thing with a bucket on the end. Whatever you have in your head, I promise you, the reality is sillier than that. Take a moment to imagine Fox’s Mental Samurai, a new game show hosted by Rob Lowe in which contestants are hurtled around in a metal basket attached to a giant robot arm and then forced to answer trivia questions.
