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The Globe and Mail (Canada)
August 30, 1985 Friday
AT THE EX Big, mean and ugly CNE Monster Crush just a crashing bore
BYLINE: JOHN BENTLEY MAYS; GAM
LENGTH: 353 words
By JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
They rolled into Toronto from Akron, the Bronx, Flint, Oshawa - all the
fun places where people still love their cars and think Ponies are just
little horses.
They thundered into Exhibition Stadium from body shops and collision
garages everywhere, their great wheels bearing them proudly through the
mud and into the hearts of the tens of thousands of cheering fans.
They were the Monster Trucks - big, mean and ugly, with 500-plus cubic
inch chrome engines and up to 1,800 horses under each gleaming hood.
But Stomper and Ice Monster and Kool Jerk and all the others weren't
here to stand around in last night's steady downpour and look pretty. They
came to slog it out in Molson's Battle of the Monster Trucks - to pull
huge weights (mounted on something called a thump truck) and crawl over
whole parking lots full of dead sedans. Stuff like that.
And were those growling, angry machines ever boring!
There was some initial hot-shot showmanship with the thump truck - "a
full pull]" the announcer shouted, as one mean truck made it all the way
to the end of the muddy track. But most of the shiny growlers and grunters
were merely spinning their wheels in the muck, like Wasaga Beach greasers
fresh out of machismo.
And you couldn't blame the rain for everything. Even if the track had
been bone dry, the Monster Crush part of the program would have been a
bore.
Lon Ranger managed to stomp all 15 cars under its big wheels. The
Monster Vette, an old Corvette mounted up high, also did all right, and
(better yet) flipped its lid to reveal colorful ribs of pulsing neon
tubing. Everyone seemed to like that, even this jaded reporter.
But then the big hot rods seemed to become daunted by the semi-
flattened cars they were supposed to be rolling over and crushing. They
just didn't appear to have the will to make a mess of things. The event
(and the evening) ended rather allegorically, with dead sedans finally
frustrating the big baddies.
Gotterdammerung? A vision of Canada, frustrating the Monster Trucks of
the USA? The symbolic possibilities are endless - which, fortunately, the
evening was not.
LOAD-DATE: January 12, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 1985 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors
All Rights Reserved
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