Can cars be celebrities? Despite my last name, I’m not interested in cars, but I still shrieked when I once saw one of the original Batmobiles on a cross-country drive, and sitting inside KITT from “Knight Rider” is a Carman family anecdote up there with “my dad met the real Colonel Sanders.” I saw the Mona Lisa (inanimate, not that large) in person, and it was fine, but I got way more serotonin seeing the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (animate, really large) stuck in traffic just ahead of me one time. Hot dog-shaped celebrity cars: they’re just like us.
Monster trucks, though, are a subcultural blind spot for me. I vaguely knew that they crushed other cars and that maybe one of them is named Gravedigger. I used to produce television commercials advertising appearances by Bigfoot the monster truck, which I had completely forgotten until I heard a couple thousand people screaming when “he”—50 years old this year and apparently a fleet of different trucks instead of just one—drove onto the BOK Center floor last Saturday night.
I lack the context and the youthfulness to presume that the touring company of Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-n-Fire is aiming for me, but I think elements of it were universally enjoyable. At its best, it was like being inside a toy commercial, replete with excited children clutching actual Hot Wheels and a far-too-boisterous-for-my-taste voiceover from the emcee. Toy commercials are 30 seconds long, which is the right length to sustain that frenetic energy. This rally was two hours long, which is not. Many beleaguered parents toted their half-asleep children out well before it ended.
Did you know monster truck rallies are competitions rather than free-for-alls? I didn’t, and it was a pleasant surprise to have something to understand, other than destructive feelings. This rally was a seven-way fight: Bigfoot, Gunkster, Mega Wrex, 5-Alarm, Tiger Shark, Boneshaker and Skelesaurus. These trucks have their own logos, theme songs, taglines and apparently signature moves, and the drivers compete for a good-sized Champion’s Cup trophy at every event.
Watching a gigantic fire truck-themed truck do wheelies is awesome, and watching Bigfoot do donuts is also awesome. It’s in the in-between where my eyebrows lowered. This was a half-full BOK Center, and the hour was late for small children, so there was a discernible lack of energy, even when directly asked for it by the hosts. There was also a significant amount of elaborate parallel parking. After flying heroically through the air and landing on a bunch of wrecked cars, the trucks pull to the side of the arena and turn their lights off without much ado.
A couple of non-crushing highlights: motocross racers doing flips off a ramp, while not on theme, were the most entertaining and impressive part for me. Incidentally, The Hives’ “Hate to Say I Told You So” played during this segment, which felt like having my ears cleaned out after the rest of the rally’s soundtrack, which was all ideologically, if not literally, that Justin Timberlake song from “Trolls.”
I also cultivated a strange affinity for Arctigon, which I thought was a zamboni during its first circle of the arena. Reappearing later, the zamboni transformed into a slow-moving, fire-breathing dragon, which then took two hilariously delicate bites out of a wrecked car—a busted passenger seat dangling from his tooth—before he took a slow victory lap and turned back into a rectangle.
Would I go see more monster trucks, knowing what I know now? Man, probably. Even with all the quibbles, I still found myself invested, earnestly muttering things like, “Is Tiger Shark having an off day? He really shit the bed in the Wheelies,” and, “Why does Bigfoot smell worse than a truck named Gunkster?”
Big congratulations to Champion’s Cup winner Boneshaker, whose driver’s finger guns to the crowd after a perfect 25 in the Donuts round made me giggle and whose acceptance speech was really quite sweet. I don’t remember his name, but then, I didn’t know the name of the Wienermobile driver either. It takes a big man to put on this kind of show with such little recognition, and it takes an even bigger truck to crush him.
The Pickup's reviews are published with support from The Online Journalism Project.
