THE founder of the popular competition series Robot Wars has died after a decades-long fight with Parkinson's Disease.
Marc Thorpe is remembered for his work building models for iconic films like Indiana Jones and Star Wars.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Megan Feffer who opened up about Thorpe's heartwrenching health battles in a Facebook post.
She said the disease hindered her father's ability to work on projects due to mild tremors, which was "particularly torturous for a fiercely independent artist like my dad."
"To say the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, were challenging for my dad would be an understatement, and I am grateful that he is finally at peace," she wrote.
But she went on to highlight Thorpe's incredible career and successes, like creating the show Robot Wars.
"He made many, many beautiful, weird, details and strange things," she wrote.
"And me… he helped make me.
"May his memory be a blessing."
Robot Wars was a UK robot combat competition series that ran from 1998 to 2004 and then again from 2016 to 2018.
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It followed a series of amateur and professional designers who attempted to design a deadly bot that would be the last standing inside a WWE-style cage.
The show was the brainchild of Thorpe, an artist and designer whose career took off when he started making fictional war machines in 1992.
That year, he landed a job with the newfound business LucasToys – a division of LucasFilms that created figures and models based on George Lucas' movies.
While attempting to design a radio-controlled vacuum cleaner, Thorpe remembers wondering what it would be like if his inventions had to fight, he wrote on his website.
It was at this moment that he had the idea for the program.
The show aired on BBC and was beloved by those in the UK and elsewhere.
Robot Wars also held events in the US in 1995 and 1997 which helped to grow an American audience.
The show went through a slew of hosts, and was launched with top English presenter Jeremy Clarkson taking the helm.
Thorpe remembers the first episode of filming fondly and said he was immediately impressed with the skills of the young people who showed up.
"We all look back with nostalgia and amazement at that first event… it was charmed," he wrote on his website.
"I was very happy those days in spite of 16-hour days, seven days a week."
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