BENT

finally got to watch our tape of the MINI snowmobile episode of Monster Garage last night.

will put the rest in the "more" section in case of spoilers...

for anyone not familiar with it, the concept behind Monster Garage is really cool. Jesse James, famous for his insane bike designs, assembles a different team each episode* to transform a stock vehicle into something completely different from what it was originally intended to do. such as making a school bus into a working pontoon boat, or a Ford Explorer (Eddie Bauer edition) into a working garbage truck. each team is given a budget of $3,000 which they must not exceed in acquiring anything necessary to make the transformation happen, and they're also given a time limit of 6 full days in which to get it done. on the 7th, their vehicle (if it's been successfully completed) participates in a competition against a real version of whatever it is they've transformed their vehicle into. so the Explorer garbage truck competed against a real garbage truck, etc, etc.

(oh, and i nearly forgot the other very stringent rule regarding their creations: the vehicle must appear stock from the outside after they've modified it.)

anyway, so the most recent episode featured the transformation of a brand new 2003 MINI Cooper into a snowmobile---something we knew would be both interesting and a bit painful to watch (i mean, they're tearing apart an innocent little MINI! ;.;). and it was a bit of both. it was also featured quite prominently in the MINI booth at the Chicago Auto Show this year, so we got to see it up quite closely (although of course we weren't allowed in it).**

while it was loads of fun to watch them design, build, redesign when things didn't work quite the way they wanted, and finally get this project together, this episode was a lot less fun than i remember the show being previously. for one, since Jesse + the show have gotten to be so well known, they got a LOT of stuff for free. they've always gotten some things for free, due to Jesse's and other team members' connections---usually wheels and tyres and such. but this time round, they got nearly everything for free; and this really rather defeats the whole budgeting challenge, which was an interesting constraint. so there's that element gone.

additionally (and i don't know if this has been the case in other more recent episodes, as i haven't seen all of them), it seems like Jesse's not really doing a whole lot and is instead having the team do all the work. it was much cooler when EVERYONE worked on the vehicle in question and put their hands all over it. at least, so i thought. from the MINI snowmobile episode, it seemed he didn't do much other than offer some suggestions here and there, put the roll cage in to stabilise the gutted MINI unibody, and then drive the thing in the competition on day seven. when the team decided to work through the night trying to work out the design flaws that had presented themselves on day 5/6, he went home and went to sleep. granted, the Discovery Channel pages refer to him as the "host," but they also always refer to the competitions as "Jesse and his team of blahblahblah," which makes you think he's doing more than just delegating. it's not much fun to watch someone with such talent just delegate and give go-aheads or vetos to other team members' ideas.

perhaps it was only the one episode. or perhaps i'm asking too much. it's not bad, mind---it's still a really fun show. but it was a whole lot better before---at least, so i think.

* = well, and the producers too, i'm sure.

** = what was PARTICULARLY funny about this was that when we first walked by it, neither of us saw the big sign announcing it as the Monster Garage MINI Snowmobile. instead, coming at it from the side as we did, we saw the paint job first. since it seems most things coming out of his garage have super-flamey paint jobs, i completely jokingly said "hey look, it's the Jesse James MINI!" Spaz and i giggled and walked away to look at other things. only upon coming back to the booth later on to drool in the MINIs some more did we see that in fact it was from Monster Garage. leading me to proclaim, "dude, i SWEAR i was joking!" XD