The Master lived to fight again, capturing the heavyweight title and a design award two weeks ago at the second annual Robot Wars, a mechanized battle in which radio-controlled warriors armed with buzz saws, drills, you-name-it, go at each other until one can go no more. Marc Thorpe, who used to build models for George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, conceived the contest while tinkering with his radio-controlled vacuum cleaner. It quickly found an audience. “I love to see the saws ripping things off,” says fan Allen Samuels, 11. “This is more violent than Power Rangers.”

Thorpe, 48, calls his sport “the soapbox derby for the ’90s.” A mix of oddball hobbyists, movie model-makers and high-school whiz kids spend as much as nine months and several thousand dollars creating their cybernetic samurai. One crew from Lucas’s ILM shows off the Merrimac, a three-and-a-half-foot-wide aluminum pyramid loaded with a complex series of gears and links, two mini-motors and a 1,000-psi nitrogen tank powering movable flaps to topple enemies. There are even father-son teams. “We’re not real sports fanatics,” says Larry Tan, 42, a digital modeler for ILM who built a ‘bot with his son Taylor, 7. “This is something we can share. And there’s something instinctive about smashing your toys after you finish playing with them.”

The Robot Wars are as much about construction as destruction. And both schools had their adherents among the 50 entrants and 1,000 spectators who turned out. “Half the fun is comparing the damage you inflict,” says designer Mike Winter, as another competitor snaps Polaroids of dents his creation has inflicted. But above all, the builders are happy to have an excuse to do something they love to do anyway–invent. As Mark Setrakian, 30, who designed the bat in “Batman Returns” as well as The Master, puts it, “I like to make cool stuff and show it to people and have them say ‘It’s cool stuff’.” Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for robots more clever than lethal. One favorite used a magnet to trap its opponent, then unfurled a roll of en-snarling tape. Another, La Machine, bested bigger opponents, including a hammer-wielding beer keg, without benefit of saw or spike. The device is simply a speedy mobile wedge, which succeeded brilliantly in flipping foes on their backs. It seems a big weapon is cool, but a big idea is better.