Destroy Build Destroy (Cartoon Network)

In DESTROY BUILD DESTROY, two teams of young people go head-to-head in an engineering-themed competition -- with a healthy dose of destruction thrown in for fun. The show's title describes the three stages of the contest. Host Andrew W.K. starts the action by asking each team to pick a method to destroy something big -- like a car or other major machine -- using high explosives, a team of burly guys armed with heavy tools, dropping it off a cliff, or another equally effective demolition technique. Using the wreckage, the teens must then construct something new that they can use in a contest (think along the lines of a tennis ball air cannon mounted on a movable platform). At the end of the show, the winning team gets to destroy the losing group's creation using even more impressive tools of destruction, including military-grade weaponry or plastic explosives.

What's not to like about blowing stuff up? And the explosions on this show are seriously big -- which means they're certain to appeal to teen and tween viewers, especially boys. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, even though the point of the show is ostensibly engineering, it's the smallest part. Two-thirds of each episode is about destroying things, and only the building phase requires thinking and creativity. Still, at least the teenage participants aren't handling the explosives (or the power tools, for that matter). They serve more as directors, telling adults what to do and watching the results. Only during the actual contest do the kids really take a hands-on role, though they certainly seem to be having fun through the entire process.

Andrew W.K. and the producers encourage a fair bit of rivalry, and a few of the comments occasionally go a bit too far. A team of skaters, for example, crows that their skills at building skateboard ramps will help them design a superior vehicle and is openly contemptuous of their rivals, a group of self-defined math team geeks whom the skaters deride as "dorks." And in the end, the contest stage seems kind of random -- and the results don't depend all that much on either group's engineering prowess. But at least the explosions are fun to watch.