How Monster Trucks Work

an announcer that is no one knows his name. He may be living or dead. I'm not sure a lot of people know his name, but we don't know his name. Well, yeah, I'm just generalizing, but from my own experience, uh and then uh, but he is a he's like a Monster Truck ad announcer, guy who's always getting you hyped up to want to go to a seat the Monster Truck rally. Yeah. I think he is second. I mean, there have been

some great announcers in the history of this country. I would put him up there with uh, Michael Buffer, So let's get ready to rumble guy. Yeah, I put Triple Sunday Man way ahead of him and Don Pardo to me, is my all time favorite. Yeah, that's Sarah Live announcer. Yeah, featuring Josh Clark. Oh, I've been waiting so long. And musical guests, Chipo, boy, that'd be a double bill. Who would be your favorite musical guest if you were the host? Oh, Boyton,

that's a good one. Sure. I was gonna say Gandhi or Jesus Christ or something like that, but I got my my fantasies confused. You know, our buddy Scott Ackerman does a great Don Pardo. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, he's he's good at that stuff. He is a brilliant comedian, he is. It's great. I've been listening to his new new Ish show with Lauren lap Kiss and Paula Tompkins our other friend, uh called Freedom, and it's hysterical and great. Yeah, good,

nice plug, Chuck. Everything Ackerman does turns to gold. Can I give you my brief rundown with off Roading as we get into the Monster Truck episode. Yeah, I predicted Dad's story coming. Yeah. Yeah, when I was and I think we talked about this a little bit and when we talked at some point about CB radios. But when we were kids, you and I in the seventies and eighties, CBS we're a big deal, the whole culture around it,

and it's hard to explain, but it's interesting. And my dad got a CBE and he and one of his better friends, Charlie, had a They both had jeeps. My dad had a brown, uh brown Jeep Renegade and Charlie had a green one, and we would go off roading. And when I was a kid, so we would go up into the mountains and literally cut roads where there were no roads, and my dad was the mud slinger

that was a seat hand. Yeah, I don't remember what Charlie's was, but we did quite a bit of it, including a fully four wheels off the ground jump at one point on this dirt road where they had been I think they're going to pave the road. So they had um bulldozed basically a ramp out of dirt and rocks and left it there to come back the next day to probably remove it. And my dad and Charlie heard about it and they're like, let's go jump the jeeps. And my dad jumped a jeep with my brother and

I en it. No seatbelts of course, oh my god, of course not. I don't think jeeps had back seat belts back then. And uh I remember hitting the ground and then bumping up been smashing my head on the roll bar. I dude, I can imagine, and you still have that divid Yeah, but it was the seventies, so I don't even think he said, is everyone okay? I think we just kept on trucking. He's like, take a salt tablet. Yeah, exactly. That's a great story, man. I had no idea that you've done any off roading. I've

done exactly zero off roading in my life. Um. I do have a deeper appreciation for it after researching all this stuff. But I have never been into monster trucks and never gone to one of those, although I will say the thought of you and uh Emily and me and you me going to one of these had a lot of appeal for some reason. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. Out of the four people you just listed, as far as I know, you mean's the only one

who's been to a I totally believe it. Yeah. Yeah, she was into um Power Motorsports for a little while there, that's great. And the one she said, it's really loud, and it's pretty great, except she said, breathing all of like the gas fumes, exhaust fumes is not super fun. You need to get one of those stadium ones outdoors. Yeah, I saw. I saw a footage of one at the in Anaheim where the Angels play. I'm like, oh, yeah,

that's an outdoor baseball stadium. That's that's the place to go see a monster truck rally for sure, not like enclosed sports arena hockey rink and I've heard of the noise is really I've been to one drag race and the noise was really bad there, so I can't imagine what it's like for a monster truck jam. Yes, but there's something about it, like even just watching like clips on YouTube like I've done the last few days, it's like I saw a couple of things that I'm going

to admit gave me goose bumps a little bit. I was. I was that impressed with it. But part of it was the noise from the engine, but also the noise of like twenty five year old guys screaming like little boys because somebody like did a wheelie, like a giant monster truck that fully adds to the sound as well, and little boys and girls screaming like grown men. Right exactly, it's weird. It's a weird scene. It's a big crisscross.

So so yes, I think it's good that we fessed up out of the gate that we're we We have not been to a monster truck rally, um, and we're not huge as far as our understanding of say, like motorized engines go that kind of thing. I feel like we could still do one on this like pretty well, um, because there's just so much to it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff to it. You don't actually have to have gone to see a monster truck rally to

appreciate it, especially if you watch some clips on YouTube. Yeah, and you know the reason I mentioned the off roading is because that is where monster truck rallies is that what they're still called munster truck jams. They're called monster jam but that's like a specific uh a specific brand of of show that you go to. Well, the monster jam wrecked I'm calling them rallies. I'm gonna call the monster truck promenades. Okay, so the prom I love it.

The cotillion started with off roading in with people like my dad in the seventies and eighties getting off road, and you know before that, even uh off roading in these pickup trucks that eventually we're like, hey, let's get some bigger tires, let's lift it up a little bit, let's get some more ground clearance. And before you know it, trucks are just a little bit bigger and taller than they were before. And a man named Bob Chandler said

from St. Louis, said, I've got a great idea. Too bad he didn't like have some sort of I P around this, but he did come up with a great idea, which was the very first big Foot. Yeah yeah, he he's very widely credited as basically the inventor of monster trucks just just from it was basically born out of necessity, like he drove his car really hard. The reason his first, uh, the first monster truck was named Bigfoot was because that was his nickname. He was well known as a very

aggressive off roading driver. Um. But because of that, he would break axels, he would get stuck in the mud, um, he would find himself in his truck more importantly in places that your average truck driver would not would not find themselves, so um, to kind of get out of those sticky situations or never get into him in the first place, he started to try to upgrade his truck well beyond anything you would buy from like a dealership. Uh. And he was a tinkerer, uh so much so, and

he got like so into it. He actually opened his own four by four parts store. Um. In part I get the very strong impression to probably get a discount on the parts that he was needing to use on his own truck that he was breaking with regularity. Yeah. Yeah.

It was called the Midwest Four Wheel Drive Center h. And the initial truck was a F to f fifty and he dressed it all up and he got those bigger axles and bigger tires and uh, he actually did invent a technology, um, which was I'm not sure if he completely invented this, but he at least installed four wheel steering on his truck, which is when the back wheels turn and the front wheels turn so you can

turn tighter. This was I don't know about a rage, but this was a thing for a while because my good buddy and your pal John Findell from New Jersey. He had one of those four wheels steering Honda Preludes that he just it was like his baby. He loved this car more than anything. I remember that. They were always like, you can get in and out of a parking spot at the grocery store like you would not believe. Yeah, you should have seen him park at the grocery store.

I forgot about the effortless. But yeah, so that makes you know, and especially in a big monster truck when you're gonna need that turning radius. Uh. And the tires got bigger and bigger. I think he landed at forty four inches, which was like a tractor tire. Yeah, initially, and that was in nineteen seventy nine, and that was

sort of the very first monster truck. Yeah. And nowadays, if you were riding around on forty four inch tires, other monster truck enthusiasts would be like, what's wrong with your tires? But at the time you could you could, like people would ask you to pull over so they could talk to you about your car when you were driving down the road with tires like that. And he

actually used it to great effect. He he advertised um his businesses parts but four by four parts business on the car um when he was driving around town, and he ended up adding the word Bigfoot, the name Bigfoot onto it. And again, at first, I believe he was basically saying, you know, like a long haul trucker will put their name or nickname or CB handle on their

on their rig, That's what he was doing. But in very short order that became the name of the car or the truck, and then in in Um and the successive trucks that came after that, there's I think iterations of Bigfoot or some offshoot of Bigfoot. Now, yeah, he you know, he made one very famous initial video, uh, sort of as a promotion like a local TV commercial basically for his business of Bigfoot riding over some other cars.

And that was it. Man. After that, people went berserk. Uh. There is one sort of I don't know if it's apocryphal, but at least we can't find the original source, but that he did get pulled over once in Bigfoot and because he would drive this thing on the road, it was just crazy, and he was ticketed because the only violation that they found was the headlights were too high off the ground. Yeah, which I mean, like I was looking at what makes monster trucks not street legal, and

that's definitely one of them. But some other ones are, like you know, usually they don't have winchaw wipers or horns or things like that. Um, it's not stuff you would think of. Another one, though, is like that, the tires can't be like too wide beyond the body, and if they do, you have to have mud flaps to cover it up. Um. There's a lot of different like laws state by state, but for the most part, yeah, you're not allowed to drive those things on the road

for a number of reasons. But yes, the height of the headlights is definitely one of them. So he takes off around the country and starts doing some promotional events. He would go to exhibitions, he would drive over a car or pull a weighted sled that looks like a giant six pack of Budweiser. Did you see some of the early Bigfoot videos, the very first one and a lot of them after that. Yeah, yeah, they were like

slow motion. They weren't like hyped up. It was just basically like, Okay, for my next trick, I'm going to start in about ninety or a hundred and twenty seconds. I'm gonna roll over this one are very slowly. Yeah, it wasn't that's what it was like. It wasn't like, yes, but no one had seen anything like it though, you know what I mean, Which so at the time what seemed boring to us now was like just mind blowing

to the people. Oh yeah, So he was he was doing pretty well, especially as far as business promotion goes, and realized that he needed a second Bigfoot because people wanted him in movies and they wanted him at their county fair. And so in eight two, Bigfoot two debut at the Pontiac's Silver Dome, this time with sixty six

inch tires, which kind of ended up being the industry norm. Yes, apparently they get um or they started out with agricultural tires, the kind of tires that you put on tractors, are

huge combines, like just giant tires. And then to save some of the weight, because these tires can be eight hundred plus pounds each fully inflated like mounted to wheels, they'll actually shave all a lot of the tread, real deep tread, the lugs I think they're called um they'll shave off a substantial portion, so they still have lots of traction because you know, at these monster truck cotillions, they're driving over like mud and dirt and everything. I

don't think those are lugs, are they? I saw somewhere somebody referred to him as lugs huge treads. I thought the lug was the thing that came out that you put the lug nut on when you change a tire. I they may have. I mean, this is a very confusing world we live in. It's it's possible that they're both called lugs. There's a lot of people laughing in us right now, which is fine. They're gonna pat us on our heads when they will probably be nicer than

soccer and chess enthusiasts. I certainly hope so, because I've seen these people get up and yell, and I don't want to be yelled at by a monster truck enthusiasts. Should we take a break and look up what a lug is and come back? Sure, Chuck, So, Chuck, where we left off? Bigfoot had really kind of established this whole thing um in the very early eighties. It appeared in Take This Job and Shove It. Did you ever see that movie? I'm sure your dad probably made you

watch it like all the time. That was an HBO special for sure. Okay, I never saw it, and I was very surprised to learn that Robert Hayes, the um, the guy from Airplane was in it, like the main guy. I would not have cast him. I'm surprised no one has reinvigorated his career, you know, like Tarantino style. Sure, sure come back, he really did. But so it was in that it was in Police Academy to six. It just it was part of like the pop culture zeitgeist

for sure. But at the same time, um, it's success and like it's popularity spawned imitators is not the right word. Um uhi mates, Yeah, fellow cotillion go or something like that. Like other people are like, yes, this is what we should be doing with our lives. And they actually, um were able to make a livelihood by appearing at some of those early like hot rod shows or um like car exhibitions or um you know, like a drag races

things like that. They would just be there to entertain the crowds, and then all of a sudden they're like, well maybe we should you know, match these things against one another, and so from that monster truck rally started to grow on their own. Yeah, I get the feeling. It was kind of like the Rodeo clown for a little while. Like you said, there would be drag races, and they said, and now you know, Bigfoot will make it a special appearance. And it's interesting in that it's

sort of started it. It kind of followed NASCAR's footprint a little bit, or stock car racing in general, because the name is right there stock cars. Like initially those cars were just juiced up cars that they would race. And initially these trucks were we're four f two fifties and Chevrolets, and they were just trucks that people built

bigger and heavier and more rugged and just made them huge. Uh. They got to a point though, where they were, like, you know, they were using military axles and stuff like that on their their big equipment because everything was breaking. But they found that those were even breaking, and as they got bigger and bigger, they said, you know what, we need to start over everybody. This is a real thing and we can't just modify these pickup trucks. We

gotta build these things from the ground up. Like NASCAR eventually ended up doing that. Yeah, and that's exactly what they did. And apparently Bob Chandler led the the the way on that as well, really tinkered around with UM CAD designs, computer assisted designs UM and one of the things he came up with. And it wasn't him specific, or it wasn't just him. They were like a group

of people working on this by this time. This is the I believe the late eighties so so, like monster trucks were a thing by now, UM, but they revolutionized it by basically saying, how about instead of these like super heavy, brittle things where the truck itself weighs a total of like fifteen thousand pounds UM and we break axles because you know they're really strong, but they're really

brittle too, Let's start using tubes instead. And they created a revolution by by by creating and welding these cages these frames out of very strong but very lightweight tubes. And you're never going to guess one of the components that they use that they make these tubes out of molybdenum. No way, way. It's funny. We heard from people about to pronounce that and someone said, every I don't know if you saw this, and they said, in the industry,

we just call it molly. Yes, I saw that too. Yeah, Yeah, there's a They use a chromium malebdumum molebden um alloy and they call it chrome molly. Wow. Yeah. So that's that's what your average monster truck is made out of. And you don't need like a like a the same amount of stuff that like a passenger vehicle needs. You need just the bare minimum amount of stuff that's gonna make this thing wrong, keep it together, and then most importantly,

protect the driver inside. Because when you strip everything away from the monster truck of today that Bob Chandler and his friends revolutionized in the late eighties, you basically have a roll cage, is what you're what you're dealing with, a giant tubular roll cage. That's what a monster truck is at its core. Yeah. And one of the other big improvements and advancements they made was moving the engine

behind the driver, so it's a mid engine layout. Uh no more, you know what's in front of you under the hood. Uh. The bodies of these things now and since the you know, late eighties, early nineties or fiberglass and they're just I mean, if you watch any videos of this stuff online of like current Monster Truck Rally or contillions, excuse me, Um, these fiberglass bodies are just they're just show pieces. They're made to just tear apart

and break away. Like very few of them end up end up in one piece at the end of these Yes, um, but they still cost like ten thousand dollars apiece. But they're super modular, super interchangeable, so that you might see the same truck a couple of times during a rally. But they just oh, sorry forget what I just said for another twenty minutes. No, I mean spoil it for the people that think they're watching different trucks. So I

am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But there are more bodies than there are actual trucks at any given Monster Truck Contillion. They're just swapping out the actual shells the fibery last body. Um, there's a crew there. I was reading about them. They're the unsung heroes of any cotillion where in between you know, um, appearances in between shows. Like a lot of times those Monster Truck jams will be you know, a couple of shows a

day on a Sunday in a certain city. Um, they're working feverishly to fix everything that's gone wrong from the abuse that that core truck took, you know, for the last couple of hours and during the show. But one of the things they do is switch out the bodies real quick so that you have you have to transport far fewer trucks. It's a lot easier to transport a lighter, fiberglass body than a big, heavy truck. Yeah. I thought it was funny. Ed the grabster help us put this together.

And at one point when he was talking about switching out the shells, he said, you know, this kind of started because multiple big foots would show up at an event, and you can't have a big foot racing a big foot. I was just like, I bet you no one would care. They probably just think it was some twelve year old boy would be like that, that ain't right right, keep put my finger on it. Something's been violated here. Uh. I don't know who knows, um, but they did. Uh uh.

They did start switching them out with regularity, and like I said, they just tear apart. If you watch any video, these drums are pretty insane. I mean they're doing like double backflips. Now, I know it's crazy, so you have to make a distinction whether you're talking about the double backflip where the truck just follow us everybody, a giant monster truck hits a ramp and does a backflip, and then before it touches the ground, it does another backflip in mid air. It looks hard to do. I didn't

see a lot of successful ones. You could also be talking about a consecutive backflip where the U does a backflip, lands and does another immediately does goes into another backflip. Both are equally impressive, but this, the single double backflip, is the harder of the two to do. Um and it's fun to watch people try and fail at but

it's also pretty great to see somebody land. Yeah, And speaking of trying and failing, we should talk a little bit about the Anderson family, another first family of monster trucks. So the father, the elder statesman of the Anderson family, was in it way early alongside Chandler and they His

family truck was the grave Digger. Eventually he passed down to his son, and then another son, and then eventually his daughter, Kristen Uh is now the driver of the Grave Digger and she set the Guinness record for altitude for the highest jump I think just last year, right, yeah, in June and beautiful Bradent in Florida. She landed a thirty three uh foot nine inch uh jump off of a truck ramp and you know, it's pretty impressive and

she uh I think it was her dad. The reason I mentioned the trying and failing thing was her dad was the first person who said, you know what, these races are fine, racing, these things are good, but what people. He was the one that said, hey, after the race, why don't the drivers just come out and do some tricks and stuff. He realized, like people like that more than the races. And although they still do race now, freestyle competition was born out of that notion, and that's

sort of where the crowd pleasing entertainment comes from. Are the drivers that are doing these jumps and the driving on two wheels and jumping over things and through things, and you know it's it's all right there on that big dirt pit and you can I mean Dennis Anderson definitely was the one to be credited with creating that, and it went from you know, just the existence of of monster trucks to monster trucks, do you know, slowly driving over a couple of cars, to them racing. Apparently

in the nineties they raced them. They got them as light as like nine thousand pounds, which is about twice as heavy as say, like a normal midsized truck today. UM they which is really light for uh, a monster truck, considering that you know, all four tires and wheels combined maybe make up two thousand of those pounds. That's really light. And they wanted them light so they could raise them and get them really fast. And then they said, you

know what people want to see. What Dennis Anderson was saying, is all the tricks, but you still need to be able to go fast. So another about twelve thousand pounds is what they clock in it. They're durable, but they're also light enough to be fast and too to hit

thirty three ft high jumps when they hit a ramp. Yeah, and they can do this thanks to a um A massive supercharged methanol powered engine UH five cubic inch motors and you've only got two speeds though it's got a very low geared transmission system and I think first gear is sort of like on an eighteen wheeler like that, just sort of get your wheels rolling and then you immediately pop into that second gear and that's all there is, because all you need is torque and acceleration, so you

can go super fast in a very shortspan, so you can hit those ramps and do whatever trick that you have up your sleeve. Yeah, and I was like, what's the what's the point of using methanol? These engines are called blown alcohol engines are in the industry, they call them alky's al k y and UM. It turns out that methanol actually is less energy dense than gasoline, but you can cram more of it into a gaseous state

than you can gas. So if you have a supercharger and air compressor that's compressing a whole bunch of blown alcohol vapors into your engine, you can actually more power, more energy out of it. So that's the reason that they all run on like pure methanol, no gasoline. Not to drop a gasoline goes anywhere near these things. Um, and they're the engines are extremely big, and they're also

extraordinarily inefficient fuel wise. Um, there's a there's one very famous monster truck called the Raminader, and it clocked in as the fastest. It was the fastest um uh monster truck on the planet. It did zero to sixty in three seconds, which is faster than a ferrari Enzo at the time or at least, but it got um two hundred and sixty four feet to the gallon and then awesome. That's I was trying to figure out before he said to the gallons, like, where's this going? Right? Wow, that's

that's really funny. Yeah, they're not worried about fuel consumption. Uh, they're worried about making that big engine go boom because people love that sound. It's hysterical. Ed put in here that they have attempted electric powered monster trucks, but they were not popular with the vans. They want to hear that engine going. It's part of the allure. I think. I think more than anything, they don't want to hear themselves.

Oh I doubt that. Um. They also have You know, if you talk about shocks, when you see these things today, it's crazy how uh they will do something where and I encourage you to go check out videos if you've never seen this stuff. Um, photos. But yeah, definitely video, No watch a video, because they can contort themselves and go back upright uh way more often than you would think,

like about eighty percent of the time. I'm like, well that thing is is on its back or it's done for the day, and it manages to just flop back over. And those wheels look like they're all independent of one another. They have for nitrogen charge shocks on every single wheel, on all four wheels. Ye uh and it's it's pretty pretty cool looking. And those those shocks are not like

normal shocks either. Your average shock has what's called a range of travel, which is the amount of basically give that it has um of about four to six inches. These usually have about twenty four inch range of travel, And like you said, there's four on each wheel. So on the one hand, that keeps the driver's spine from compressing every time they you know, land after a huge jump, and on the other hand, it also pushes the truck off of objects, objects and obstacles. Um. And I don't

know if we said those huge giant tires. You know, in a normal car, you're you've probably got about thirty three pounds per square inch inflation in them. Uh, these have maybe eight to ten so there's a lot of bounce in the tire. There's a huge amount of range of travel in the shocks. When you put it all together, they can pop up on their back wheels, they can

pop up on their front wheels. They can just do tumbles and somersaults and all sorts of crazy stuff because of those shocks and that that virtually deflated tires that are basically like giant balloons. Yeah, they bounce. They need more cushion for the pushing. They bounce around quite a bit. I think, you know, safety is an important thing, and like NASCAR, again, they sort of followed that model of in the early days. I would be surprised that Bob Chandler even use a seat belt. He seems kind of

like a wild card to me. But like I said, along with NASCAR, they started improving, um the safety over the years. There are still things like back injuries. UM. Fire is another thing that's it's obviously um because you know when you flip these things over and you're bouncing around. They those fuel it's not just like a regular gas tank or oil reservoir. They're like super modified and there are backup systems and redundancies to make sure they're not

throwing flaming gas all over people. Uh, they're automatic fire extinguishers like in NASCAR. They're wearing those fire suits and gloves. Yeah, I think they even. Um, I'm not sure if it's the exact Hans device, but the device that I think after I might be wrong. I'm just going from memory, but I think after Dale Earnhardt died is when they brought in that device basically that straps a NASCAR driver's head completely stationary. Yes, and I think that's what they're

using in monster trucks as well. Yeah. So I was reading a guy who went to Monster Truck University in Illinois or Monster jam University and got to test out driving a monster truck. And he said, you're your field of vision or your feel. Yeah, it is basically relegated to how how much you can move your eyeballs in their sockets. Yeah, your head is not moving at all. And um, and not only is your head to mobilize, your your body is basically too, except for your arms.

And you're strapped in with a five point seat belt that's actually ratcheted in. It's not some buckle like they use ratchets to to to screw them in so you are in that thing. And then also, if you're an actual professional monster truck driver, the seat that you're sitting in has actually been molded to your body, so you um do you bumby can't fluctuate and wait too much if you're on the monster truck circuit or else, You're not going to fit into your own seat, you know. Yeah,

you gotta watch your weight. I imagine, uh, And you know, the whole debate about whether race car drivers or athletes is uh, there of course are athletes, and I would imagine a monster truck driver. It takes a lot of tool in the body and they have to be in pretty decent shape as well. Sure. Also, like whoever, whoever you are listening, you couldn't do this totally. It's not something like driving one of these things is not intuitive. It's not like, not only do you have to learn it.

I get the impression that you have to be basically naturally talented to start with to even get good at it at all. Too. Yeah, I mean, should we talk a little bit about driving. I think one thing we did mention, which is pretty coolol, is that the driver sits in the middle. It's not mounted on the left side like we drive here in the United States. It's in the center because for a very good reason, so so your arm doesn't fly out the window and get crunched.

That's a big one. And I actually have seen a picture of um Bob Chandler driving Bigfoot. Yes, he's leaning out the window looking at the ground, like checking his clearance, but he's like he might as well be going ten miles an hour down a country road for the way that he's sitting in this car. I'm like, especially now knowing that they they're like strapped in and in the center of the car, it's just hilarious to see. I can't believe the guy is still alive. Yeah, I mean,

is he still a lot today? Is still yes? Um? He uh? Like we said, there are only those two gears, and there's also still that rear wheel steering that Chandler came up with, and I don't think we mentioned he called it a four by four by four because four by four obviously for four wheel drive, and then that four wheel steering. But you now can turn those on and off the four wheel steering feature with the toggle switch.

That's how it. Yeah, so like flipping that switch on and off and steering and you know, hitting the gas where you're and I don't think we got to that part yet, but you're it's actually attached via a toe loop to the accelerator throttle because they would have problems with sticking accelerators and that is not good in a monster truck that can go that fast. So now you

can pull back on the accelerator. But all of this stuff takes a lot of practice, and that's why you would go to the Monster Truck University, yes, and have to be naturally talented to UM. And then there's also safety issues chuck that they've come up with because there

have been a lot of tragedies. Apparently no no monster truck drivers ever died driving a monster truck, but plenty of spectators have been killed because of things like and you crush a car, debris can fly everywhere, um, parts of the monster truck itself can come off, and they're um usually moving pretty fast and are pretty heavy um when they're flying through the air. And then sometimes monster

trucks can just like drive into crowds. So if you go to a monster truck rally or Cotillion, whatever your your preferences. Um, you will see that the lower seats are just totally you can't go down there because these things are so unpredictable and can so easily spin out of control that that it's just not safe to be

anywhere near ground level when one of them is driving around. Yeah, and I think after they implemented that, there were incidences where the trucks did go up into those empty seats where where and everyone involved looked around and just sort of nodded like, yeah, we did it. Yeah, just save some lives. And then also there's another thing too where if you go to one of these shows, you'll find that there's four people standing around each corn or of

the hockey rink or the baseball diamond or whatever. Um, that they have little remote controls that in each one of them is capable of completely shutting off the engine in the fuel immediately with the press of a button, And they do that in case the driver is knocked unconscious, but the the throttle is still down in the cars there the truck still running around. Yes, you don't want a ghost driven monster truck inside of a stadium full

of people. I mean, do you know then that just shout how dangerous this is that there's people standing by with remote controls that turn the thing off if you're

knocked unconscious while you're doing your job. Yeah, and you know, maybe we won't go over all these, but there have been fatalities multiple times through the years at monster truck rallies, including small children getting getting killed in the audience, and um, you know this was mainly in the nineties, but there was one in Mexico and there was something else in So Yeah, which is I don't know, why is that

surprising to me? The Netherlands has monster truck rallies. But I mean these people, they were just standing around like they were watching I don't know, a couple of dogs do it or something like that, just in a circle, and then all of a sudden, the monster truck loses control and just plows into the crowd. I think it killed like three or four people. Yeah, like they're watching Disney on Ice basically, break yeah with that one for sure.

All Right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and reveal why I mentioned Disney on Ice right after this to Chuck. All right, so you mentioned there were at least twenty five different big bigfoots over the years. Bigfoot is you know, it's part of popular culture and on the nomenclature. Like Emily Will if she sees a big truck in our neighborhood, will be like, you know, look at that bigfoot, get out of the way, or some big foot. I mean, let me just rephrase restate

what I said. It was in Police Academy too and six. You had two different times. I'm sure when they got to six they're like, who should we bring back there? Like, definitely the guy that makes the noises Robert Hayes. No, no, no, no not phrase. Yeah, let's get big Foot back in here. They were gonna he came that close to having his career advised by Police Academy six, but they skipped him over for big So Bigfoot fourteen jumped to seven, seven and nine, and then big Foot five. If you look

this thing up, it's it's pretty ridiculous. Um it's the biggest one of all. They built big Foot five with UH tires that are ten ft tall that were used on the VC twenty two snow freighter land train, which was this. I mean it's a train, it's really a vehicle connected to other vehicles. It's more like a big shipping bus, but it's a trackless freight train basically that they shuttled supplies uh between Cold War early warning outposts

between Alaska and Canada in the fifties. And if you look up big Foot, uh, which one was at fourteen, just just take a look at those ridiculous tires. It doesn't look as fun or as nimble because they're just super tall and not as wide. Uh. But yeah, it was, it was. It was a stunt. It's ostentatious, even for a monster truck. I think so, And it just doesn't look as nimble and as fun. Um. For those of you who were raised in the nineties rather than the eighties,

Grave Diggers probably even more familiar than Bigfoot. And like we said, Dennis Anderson, the original creator of Grave Digger and whose family keeps driving for him, um, was the guy who basically came up with freestyle monster trucking. Yeah, hats off to him. I think his daughter Kristen is the the only first and only full time monster truck driver who's a woman. Oh yeah, hats off to her as well, and also in the Guinness World Record Holder too,

which is nothing to sneeze an that's right. There's also um, you know, since we were talking about fiberglass bodies are super removable. Since you're no longer having to kind of work with anything that was originally a car or a truck, you can kind of do whatever you want. And some people model like the Grave Digger is modeled after a fifties Chevy panel van Um. There's one that's uh that called the Big Cahuna that looks like a Woody from

the sixties that you know, go surfing in um. And then there's some that don't look like cars at all, or they look like cars that are hybridized with like animals, like El Toro Loco is a bull with horns. My personal favorite is golow Down Giant Shark. There's higher ed as a yellow school bus. UM. There's one called the Zombie Chuck that has arms sticking and tattered, tattered rags

coming off of it like a zombie. And then one of the best ever, the Mohawk Warrior with a giant mohawk sponsored by Great Clips Is it really, which really kind of reveals like the state of monster truck contillions today. It is super commercialized and the main reason why it's super commercialized because Monster Jam, which started out from you know, the hot Rod Racing community UM, was bought by Feld Entertainment, which has a lot of different live touring acts and

one of them is Monster Jam. Yeah, and that was not without some controversy. UM, you know, prior to the big corporate takeover that was it was people like Bob chand Or. It was it was these people that would get together, maybe get a sponsorship and raise some money because they're very expensive to build. Obviously, it's not like they were all just like rich guys doing this stuff.

So you get a sponsor, you'd build out a monster truck team and your truck you'd be paid money to show up at an event, and if your truck gets

some notoriety, you get more money. And I think in eighty five is when the United States hot Rod Association UM started having these races where there were actually rules in a point system, and then these other point series started up, and eventually that culminated in eight when a bunch of the drivers got together informed UH the m t r A, the Monster Truck Racing Association, where you finally had some like real safety rules and UM, everything

was just sort of codified. Uh. But then you know that's when the sort of corporate takeover thing started coming in and there was a lot of controversy with Feld Entertainment coming in there, and they're like, it's sort of

lost a bit of its soul. Uh. In the Monster Truck world, and half the trucks that you see at any given rally will be felled trucks, and and they're and they're rigging it, so they're the felled trucks are winning, which is you know, some people say some people might get worked up about that, and others might say it's

just about the entertainment. Who really cares about the competition, right, And it's very much the same as like getting worked up about you know, pro wrestling being rigged, where it's like, yes, it is, it's for entertainment purposes. Is this isn't a sport, but it's it's still very athletic. What you're seeing is really hard to do. Um, it's really impressive. It takes

a lot of work to make that happen. Um. So yeah, it's for entertainment, but it's still legitimate and all these other ways, and just just stop being upset and kick back and enjoy it, yeah, or don't and don't go and just shut up about it. Well that's what Bob Chandler did with Bigfoot. He's Bigfoot is is conspicuously absent from all of the Monster Jam series because he didn't

like Feld entertainment. And apparently he since said, you know, I would have liked to have maybe not done that, because I think my life would be a lot easier. I'd probably be fifty times richer. But um, you know, it is what it is. And so Bigfoot is still its own thing, on its own, just being Bigfoot. It's going to a big Foot. You got anything else, I've got nothing else. This is interesting. I gotta say I

enjoyed watching those YouTube beds. Same here. Uh, I'm still not interested in going to one unless the four of us go together. All right, Well, we'll make it happen once this pandemic passes. We're going. But it can't be the first live event I go to that. Okay, fair enough, but we will go. We will go. We'll go to the KFC Yum Center in Lexington, Kentucky to see it. Um. And in the meantime, everybody, if you were at all entertained by this episode. Go check out some Monster Truck

clips and specifically look up moonwalking. It's one of the most amazing things you will ever see in your life. So, as I said, it's one of the most amazing things you've ever seen in your life. Obviously, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this a correction email. We like to read corrections when we get stuff wrong. It's been a hallmark of the show, and I'm gonna read one right now from Mike. Hey, guys, I was listening to the Uranium Mining podcast today, which was great and

super interesting. However, I just want to let you know, and I expect I'm not the only person who emailed, but you are, Mike, that uranium is categorically not from the Big Bang. During Big Bang nucleosynthesis, hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium were produced, including various isotopes and basically nothing else.

Uranium is produced from supernovae exploding stars. During the final seconds of a life star, something called the r process ocres, where dozens of neutrons can rapidly be added to the existing atom at nuclei. Some of these neutrons will subsequently decay into protons and electrons until the stay will or at least quasi stable isotope has reached such as uranium. Uh, cheers, thanks for all the great podcasts. That's from Mike. Cheers any kind of abruptly there, but man, thanks for this

school in Mike. Who knew? Mike? I I definitely did not know, and I like to think that I know basically everything there is to know about the Big Bang. There you have it, no uranium, Thanks Mike. UM, if you want a school, it's like Mike did. We are always willing to sit in awe of someone else's giant brain. UM. So you can email us. That's the best way to get in touch these days. Wrap it up and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.

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