‘American Ninja Warrior’ to roll at speedway
Daytona is the third stop for popular NBC competition.
DAYTONA BEACH — Even with the show’s well-known obstacle course only half-assembled amid a driving rainstorm last week, it wasn’t hard to envision the spectacle of NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior” unfolding beneath the glow of the famous Daytona International Speedway marquee.
“American Ninja Warrior,” a popular NBC prime-time athletic competition now entering its ninth season, will tape episodes on Friday and Saturday in front of the Speedway’s main entrance.
By midweek, the show’s imaginative obstacles — a gauntlet that typically includes rolling logs, vertical climbing walls, spider walks and ziplines, among other challenges — were starting to take shape.
“It’s much more imposing in person,” said Sean Fitzgibbons, the show’s line producer. To illustrate, he paces off the 12 steps that a competitor has to build enough momentum to scale t h e Warped Wal l , a c o n - cave-curved 15-foot vertical climb. “That’s not much space — and it’s a little steeper than it appears on TV.”
By comparison, Fitzgibbons and his 125-member production crew are pleased with the amount of room the Speedway parking lot offers for a 10-day production that arrived in more than a dozen tractor-trailer trucks loaded with tons of steel trusses and other parts.
On site, the show needs space for two semi-trucks, generators, a production trailer, catering tent, not to mention the 400-foot-long obstacle course.
When the show visited the historic district of San Antonio it snarled traffic and required city bus routes to be re-directed, Fitzgibbons said.
“It’s really hard to fit this (production) in a lot of places,” Fitzgibbons said. “Here, we’re really lucky.”
The Daytona Beach stop is the third road trip out of six planned to produce episodes for the show’s upcoming season to launch on June 12, according to NBC.
The Daytona Beach city qualifying show will air June 26 and the city finals will air on Aug. 7, according to NBC. Competitions also will unfold in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Kansas City, Cleveland and Denver, on the way to the championship in Las Vegas.
The presence of a recognizable backdrop is one of the factors involved in selecting show locations, said Anthony Storm, one of the show’s executive producers.
“We look for some sort of iconic structure,” Storm said. “Daytona has the iconic speedway and that was immediately appealing to us. Everyone knows that majestic structure and it has the size and scope to put our course in perspective.”