Monster Trucks and Paintball, the show that almost was.

[Fubarius]

As a child my family was into offroad motorsports, and we attended some big 4x4 meet over in Indiana for a weekend. There was a big car show (well, truck show technically), mud bog races, tough truck competition, and the like. And quite a few monster trucks including the biggest name of them all at the time, Bigfoot. And while there getting to talk to the drivers and look at the trucks up close they were handing out pamphlets for a new show idea they were working on. Combining monster trucks with this new at the time thing called paintball. The trucks would drive around an obstacle course, over cars the the like, while a gunner sat in the passenger seat (this was back when monster trucks were a bit closer in design to actual road trucks) shooting paintballs at the other trucks. They said they were working on a system where when a body panel on the truck got hit a charge would blow it off of the vehicle. A heck of an idea, especially for the late 80's when I heard about it.

There would be two teams. One led by Bigfoot with two new trucks, Futurefoot and Brass Eagle. Yes, that Brass Eagle, which would be a major sponsor. The other team would be Snakebite (who was being promoted as Bigfoots "rival" at the time, even though they were both built by the same guys), and two new trucks, Junkyard Beast and Sharkrusher.

Now I hadn't even thought of this for decades, part of my brain thinking this was some fever dream or weird combined memory thing. But this is the internet, and sometimes you wander down a random wiki rabbit hole and you find things...



From a temporary tattoo sheet they handed out, the lower left truck was the Brass Eagle truck, though hard to see.

So they were still working on this in late 1993, but it was inevitably canceled. Interesting how they were promising full auto 30mm paintball canons, when Brass Eagle at the time barely had a functional semi auto. Though some Golden Eagles ca-chunking out the side of a monster truck would have been a heck of a thing to see.

[SignOfZeta]

What a monumentally impossible idea.

[Fubarius]

The rabbit hole goes deeper...

Imagine if you will a series that combines off-road motorsports, professional wrestling, bikini babes, and yep, paintball.

Add that together with the style and technology of 2002 and you get Thunderdome.

https://video.popstaronline.com/channel/thunderdome/video/thunderdome-episode-3/

Now they only had paintball featured (if you could call it that, more on that later) on one episode, the one I linked, but it gives an example of what they could have done with more episodes. Luckily for us they only made 6 episodes of this (and that's being generous with the definition of episode, more on this later as well), so we got spared.

The show, well, wasn't good. It had some interesting concepts, but they just didn't fit together. Or they couldn't make them fit together. From the first episode they tried to sell the show as being in media res. Starting in the middle as it were. With the two featured drivers, Cam Houston (or as I like to think of him, Car-part City-name) and Stealth (aka, Dollar Store Stig) are bitter rivals. They have been for years (first episode of new show), here's clips from their last race against each other from last week on Thunderdome (again, FIRST EPISODE OF NEW SHOW). Clips that are in fact from a featured race in a later episode. And now here's the current season points totals (which isn't at zero). And the hundreds of thousands of dollars the drivers have won so far, like we the audience have any reason to care. And the list has like 10 names on it, and three of those names are drivers you never see on the show.

Why the heck are you starting a new show by trying to make me think I've missed out on what you imply is YEARS of it already existing? I mean continuity if fun, but then of course you ruin it by reshowing races that were supposed to be in the past in later episodes. Did you really think the quarter of an episode devoted to some bikini babe would distract us? Well, yes, it does, best part of the show actually.

More rant and review later...

P.S apologies in advance for anyone braving the streaming service I linked. It's a weirdly defunct service that I'm pretty sure the owners have forgotten about. It's all shows you've never heard of, and is monetized by commercials. Well, commercial. One. Singular. Every damn ad break, the same fricken commercial.

[Chuck E Ducky]

I feel like this should be merged with the RC monster truck thread then battle them to the death.

Paintball battle bots.