| Monster Garage |
 Monster Garage Stomps into Petersen Automotive Museum
Text and photos by Steve Temple
You’ve probably seen them on TV, those amazing Monster Garage creations by Jesse James— not the wild-West outlaw but the legendary Harley customizer. This brawny bike builder turns perfectly good vehicles into Franken-rides: a Mustang that mows the lawn, a Porsche that picks up golf balls, an Explorer that accumulates trash cans. You name it—Jesse and the Monster Garage can build it. And these oddball yet fully functional inventions were all on display in November at the Petersen Automotive Museum as part of a Monster Garage traveling exhibit with a special appearance by Jesse James himself.
Appearing on the Discovery Channel, Monster Garage debuted last summer to stellar ratings. The initial four-hour special was so successful that Discovery has added an entire season of logic-defying episodes to its prime-time schedule. Monster Garage airs weekly on Monday nights with an encore presentation on Saturdays.
Custom motorcycle-maker extraordinaire Jesse James is the host of this captivating series. In each hour-long episode, he leads a team of ingenious, real-world designers, artists, mechanics and engineers. These hand-picked free-thinkers remake an everyday vehicle into a machine capable of competing against its real word counterpart, be it a garbage truck, pontoon boat, nut shaker or hot air balloon, but without trying to go beyond the lines of the original automobile (at least not much, anyway).
Recently, Monster Garage "went postal" with a tricked-out MAC tool truck that delivered packages faster than you lick a stamp, come rain, shine, snow or hail. What condition they arrived in wasn’t James’ concern. With catapult expert Ron Toms and air-cannon expert David Norris, the Monster Garage team got, well, medieval. They installed a Gatling gun-style air cannon capable of firing multiple packages 100 feet horizontally in rapid succession.
Another larger air cannon, the first of its kind, was mounted on the roof. It can shoot square packages over 150 feet.
Upcoming episodes include a Mini Cooper that morphs into a snowmobile, a motorhome that can wash cars, and a NASCAR stock car that cleans up the track as a street sweeper with the help of race car driver Kyle Petty and his Petty Racing Team.
What’s the inspiration for Monster Garage contraptions? The show’s creator and executive producer, Thom Beers, recalled that while sitting in Los Angeles traffic, he kept looking at the cars next to him and started to redesign them. It was the driver that started the process. The guy in the SUV looked like a garbage man. The man in the Mustang looked like a landscaper. The guy driving a school bus looked like he just wanted to be on vacation on a lake in Minnesota. So that’s how it all started.
The hardest part is figuring out how to top these wild and wonderful creations. But in the Monster Garage, where there’s an extreme and twisted will, there’s usually a way. Tune in to see how Jesse and his posse pull it off.
For more information, log onto Discovery.com and click on the Monster Garage. It’s the Discovery Channel’s number-one online fan site, helping to connect Monster Garage aficionados with each other and to the people who make the show possible. Through the site, users can talk to each other via discussion boards, submit ideas for future transformations and show off pictures of their own "monster" creations. In addition, host Jesse James, producers and other team members often log on and join the discussions, sometimes resulting in a monster-size stir of controversy. You can reach Discovery.com’s Monster
Garage fan site at the following:
http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/monstergarage/monstergarage.html |
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