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Debuting September 13, 1998 over Britain's Channel Four, the "futuristic" game show Scrapheap pitted two teams of four players against each other in a race to "invent" new technology. Using the metallic scraps found in an urban junkyard, the players were required to build buggies, boats, rockets, catapults, "power-pullers," and the like within a time frame of ten hours -- or, as host Robert Llewellyn put it, "until the sun falls out of the sky." In keeping with the series' "mongrel" format, star Llewellyn was garbed in the post-apocalyptic manner of Mel Gibson in the Mad Max movies. Broadcast on a weekly, 60-minute basis, Scrapheap was retitled Scrapheap Challenge beginning with its September 5, 1999 episode. In America, the series was seen over The Learning Channel cable network under the title Junkyard Wars (which later became a separate series of its own).