Jay Gould’s Photography Blog

What Happend to the Monster Trucks? When did America’s awe twist into malice? I had the ol’ tube on the other day and saw an advertisement for a monster truck show coming to Minneapolis. This ad showed little except trucks flipping over to break under their own bulk or spinning until a wheel or two flew off. The voice was the same characteristic shout from my youth, but the images were not what I remember.

First, I should mention that as a child I obsessed about many things, but two topics earned more attention than most: Dinosaurs and, of course, Monster Trucks. I went to indoor shows with huge ear mufflers designed to keep out gunshot volume, and it was just enough for those rediculous, raw engine noises. I watched VHS tapes weekly with slackjawed daydreaming. When the tape was over I sketched and meticulously planned the first monsters I dreamed to someday attempt to build… probably to be ready to strike fear on the road the day I turned 16.

I loved and respected those machines. They were awe-inspiring icons of power and ingenuity… not destruction. In fact, witnessing their constant demise would probably have shattered an idol I held dear. The VHS tapes, specially prepared by the American Hot Rod Association presented each truck as a legend with low camera-angle shots of the beasts coming out of the darkenss with a mythical story involving steadfast heroics appropriate to their name. Looking up to these trucks was harmless. Their drivers, to me, were annonymous. They did not say offensive things or kill a few innocents while driving drunk; the trucks were my imagination’s role models, in a metaphorical sense.

It is for this reason that I disapprove of current monster truck advertisements. Sure, they probably work perfectly, especially for the adults, but I like to think that those trucks are still sparking kid’s imaginations and allowing them to believe that they can design and build anything no matter how strange. Seeing the bohemouths breaking apart so readily doesn’t make all kids scream with red-eyed delight. Some instead see the diminishing of a once strong icon; their invincible warrior slaughtered needlessly in the Coliseum.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.