Monster trucks exist in one of the oddest intersections of popular culture. Their very existence is born and bred from the rural interest in trucks and machines, an adult culture of alcoholic beverages and mechanized stress relief for the working class. At the same time, they are the dream machines of kids, as well as those who market to kids, selling toys and video games by the warehouse and dominating TV and tablet screens with endless playlists of freestyles and crashes.
The struggle for promoters from the inception of the industry has been to find the right mix of appealing to the two groups to maximize ticket sales and merchandising opportunities. Today, sometimes cartoonish looking trucks are presented as serious competitors with the events taking on an almost X Games bent…and it works. Stadiums and arenas are filled, Spin Master and Hot Wheels make bank on diecasts, and monster trucks appear on all sorts of media, from the usual NBC Sports-style broadcasts to more niche segments like Hoonigan. While the sport has been riding that fine line to great success for two decades now, it wasn’t always easy.
In 1993, the largest promoter of monster truck shows in America took the biggest gamble in the history of the business in an attempt to hard pivot their series from a tobacco-sponsored niche motorsport to a multimedia kids franchise that they hoped would rival the biggest toy and entertainment brands of the day. That gamble, largely, failed. But it did plant the seeds for success that would only sprout almost a decade later.
Monster Wars is, in short, a 1993 syndicated television series that featured legitimate, competitive monster truck racing interspersed with fantasy segments of mascots representing several of the trucks verbally sparring before and after heat races. However, it is so much more than that. It is a landmark moment in the history of monster truck racing, one in which the promoter, the legendary SRO/PACE Productions that is the ancestor of the current Feld Motor Sports, doubled down on the idea that the personalities of the trucks were more important than any performance standard or driver ability. SRO/PACE’s method was ham-fisted, but at the time, it wasn’t as outrageous as it initially seemed.
First, a bit of back story is required. For the first few years after Bob Chandler and Bigfoot became national icons, monster trucks as a whole were exhibition vehicles, primarily as side acts to truck and tractor pulls. The invention of the weight transfer machine sled finally allowed pulling to be both fair and unrestricted, and it caught the eye of those who had the dream of bringing motorsports indoors to arenas and stadiums, where more tickets could be sold and the crowds could be on top of the action. Many of those pioneering promoters had backgrounds in drag racing, where through the 1960s and 1970s funny cars filled a similar role as monster trucks would come to. Outrageous looks, outrageous power, and outrageous personalities. The Snake, the Mongoose, Jungle Jim, Chi-Town Hustler, Blue Max, and many more became well known throughout the country, aided by the development of match races - scheduled appearances at local venues for a flat fee, win, lose, or draw against the competition. Promoters quickly saw monster trucks in a similar light to the nitro floppers, and added them as intermission attractions to the serious matter of the pulls themselves.
It didn’t take too long before someone realized, “Hey, maybe we can race these.” The first monster truck race was in 1982 between Bigfoot and USA-1 over a dragstrip full of cars for the TV show That’s Incredible! It wasn’t until 1985 that it became a stadium attraction, SRO/PACE (under their United States Hot Rod Association banner) holding what’s considered the first real race event with 8 trucks at the Louisiana Superdome, again for TV, this time the syndicated special Return of the Monster Trucks. It did not take long for other promoters to follow, and in 1987 TNT Motorsports began running events that were monster truck racing exclusively, no pulls or mud bogging in sight, and a year later they formalized the first points championship series, the famed Monster Truck Challenge. After a successful 1988 series in which ESPN viewers could see USA-1 best Bigfoot over the entirety of the schedule, TNT expanded their TV offerings with a show on The Nashville Network and, more critically, a syndicated show known as Tuff Trax.
Tuff Trax very quickly became TNT’s primary media outlet, and with it came a toy deal and increased interest in the Monster Truck Challenge series. This all despite the fact that Bigfoot, still the most popular truck in the sport, sat out the majority of the 1989 season while creating a new, truly unstoppable contender. Luckily, TNT had another truck on its roster that had rocketed to popularity - Grave Digger.
Dennis Anderson and Grave Digger hit the national scene in 1987, fans immediately taking notice of the giant vintage panel van with the creepy graveyard mural and red headlights. Every other truck, despite cool names and cool paint jobs, still seemed blasé in comparison to Digger’s immediately striking image. Then Anderson got behind the wheel and fans learned that if the truck looked possessed, the driver definitely was possessed. Anderson’s first weekend at a televised event saw him take down Bigfoot head-to-head, Digger gyrating and bouncing almost the entire time. A star was born, and TNT was quick to take advantage. Grave Digger would eventually become the flagship for TNT’s promotional activities in Bigfoot’s absence. It was the cover truck for the Galoob Tuff Trax toy line, and TNT went so far as to create a custom theme song for it. Grave Digger didn’t win much in the grand scheme of things, and didn’t challenge for the championship, but Anderson’s driving ensured that there would be at least one memorable Digger moment on every Tuff Trax episode.
Perhaps more importantly, Grave Digger moved merchandise in unheard of quantities. TNT once stated that in 1989 they sold 40,000 Digger shirts and 20,000 Digger hats. It’s easy to see why - the truck essentially came prepackaged with an entire graveyard aesthetic for the designers to follow. Surprisingly, none of this was intentional. The name was a eureka moment from Anderson while trash talking his then fellow mud racers. The mural that followed was painted by airbrush artist Fred Bumann, who upon hearing the name was brought back to the horror comics of his youth, and subsequently used them as inspiration for the foggy graveyard, iconic ghostly skull, and lettering dripping in blood. The red lights were directly from a school bus that Anderson cannibalized into a hauler. All of these bits and pieces created a truck with more personality than any before it - Grave Digger seemed less like a machine and more like an entity, a being unto itself. Fans were captivated by it, and TNT suddenly had a goldmine on their hands. If only they could get the other trucks to have that same mystique…
Sadly, TNT never got the chance to try it with the other trucks. For the 1990 season, the Bigfoot team returned with Bigfoot 8, a lightweight, long travel, space framed super monster that seemingly skipped years of evolution and went straight to the future. Suddenly, the equivalent of a Formula One car was racing against local short track modifieds. After a few weeks of uncontested dominance, TNT banned the truck on the grounds that the nitrogen shock suspension was too radical because it had neither traditional leaf or coil springs. Chandler did not take this lightly, and while ultimately a revised Bigfoot 4 was pressed into service to salvage points, the team still sued TNT to allow the truck back in. The ensuing legal battle, along with TNT generally overextending itself to reach the heights it had, caused the promoter to look to sell, and in the summer SRO/PACE bought it out, absorbing much of their schedule as well as the truck roster - Grave Digger included.
By this point, the USHRA series that SRO/PACE ran had been christened the Camel Mud and Monster Series thanks to RJ Reynolds sponsorship. TNT’s daily TV slot on ESPN was seen as more valuable and most of the focus was placed on that product over the next few years. SRO/PACE did retain TNT’s Tuff Trax syndication agreements, however, and continued to produce the program, albeit primarily as extended versions of their ESPN broadcasts rather than a dedicated series. Over the following year, they would rebrand the show Super Trax, and at some point in 1992 they added green screen studio segments.
A few of the late 1992 broadcasts are on YouTube, and they present a rough form of what was coming next. The 1992 Camel season was contested exclusively among six trucks - Bigfoot, Bear Foot, Taurus, Carolina Crusher, Equalizer, and Grave Digger - the group heralded (largely correctly) as the Six Best Monster Trucks in the World. With a consistent lineup, the production began including truck logos along with themed backgrounds when introducing the competitors. While the theming was somewhat tenuous - Taurus used an Ancient Roman temple presumably because of the Latin name - the germ of what was to come was there.
The 1993 season would represent a major shakeup in the USHRA schedule. Camel only funded the mud racing points championship, and those events would run independently of the monster truck championship, now known as the Super Series. Some Super Series events would be Camel events, but most Camel branded events would not feature the Super Series, especially in smaller arena venues. The Super Series itself would be based primarily on stadium events, with only one arena weekend (the Nassau Coliseum in the New York City metro area) and several speedway shows in the summer months. More significantly, the truck lineup would be expanded and would lack Bigfoot. who, while still doing shows for SRO/PACE, would not run the mainline series. The remaining five of the “Six Best” would compete, along with First Blood and Invader, picked up from the USHRA Red Man Pulling tour championship, Predator, Kodiak, and relative newcomer Tropical Thunder. Liquidator was also scheduled to make appearances throughout, with teammate UFO in tow.
If that lineup seemed random, well, it kind of was, but with good reason: for the bulk of the trucks, SRO/PACE had teamed up with production company 4Kids and toy maker Matchbox to give the trucks a makeover and dedicated theming, replete with superhero mascots. Only seven trucks ended up with makeovers on track, and only eight trucks got mascots, though one didn’t make it onto the TV show:
Grave Digger kept its usual look but got a grim reaper mascot.
Carolina Crusher got its colors cut to just red and yellow, a new logo, and a construction worker mascot.
Equalizer added orange to its color scheme and got a Captain America ripoff mascot.
First Blood got a new logo, added neon yellow, and a vampire mascot.
Taurus changed its colors to black and bronze and got a cowboy mascot.
Invader got a neon yellow and pink scheme with an alien cyborg mascot (who looks suspiciously like Halo’s Master Chief a decade early).
Predator received a full makeover as a black panther with a “3D” hood and got a bizarre human-cat hybrid mascot.
Liquidator got a new fluorescent green military camo scheme (ignore the fact that fluorescent green would defeat the purpose of camo…but whatever) and got a Rambo style mascot who made some live event appearances but was not carried over into the TV show. He’s visible in wide shots of the truck in the Uniondale episodes.
It’s now known that most of the other truck owners were pitched redesigns but turned them down. Bear Foot was sponsored by Dodge, so owner Fred Shafer was obliged by their branding restrictions. Mark Bendler has shown images of a Yeti mascot and theme for Kodiak, but turned it down to not jeopardize a potential sponsor deal that ultimately fell through. Tropical Thunder’s Wayne Smozanek had also been pitched a revised look, but no official information has ever been made available. UFO is presumably too close to Invader’s theming to have gotten a pitch.
The idea of mascots for the trucks was not strictly new. Two years earlier, Bigfoot had debuted Snake Bite as part of their toy deal with Mattel, the intent being to have a direct rival to Bigfoot that the team itself owned the rights to. To keep the charade up, they put a mask on long time driver Gene Patterson and named him Colt Cobra. Patterson relished the role and added little flourishes, like a “fangs” hand gesture during interviews. Snake Bite also pioneered the “3D” body craze that Predator latched onto. Most older fans could easily see through the ruse, but kids loved Snake Bite and it quickly became a popular truck in its own right independent of any rivalry with Bigfoot. As an aside, that Mattel toy deal was still active in 1993, which is why Bigfoot was not part of the Super Series.
To SRO/PACE the mascots served two purposes: firstly, to define the characters of the individual trucks. Grave Digger was easy, but making Equalizer, a truck named after a TV show, or Taurus, a truck named after a zodiac sign, into cohesive personalities would be difficult otherwise. Secondly, the mascots were there to do something the drivers weren’t very good at, adding drama. Monster truck drivers of the day were not the trained media representatives they are now, and the widespread southern drawls and somewhat awkward interviews were de rigueur for hardcore fans, but weren’t going to capture any new eyes. The mascots were free to be big, loud, and aggressive in ways the drivers could never be.
To that end, after debuting the mascots at most of the first quarter dates, their costumes were refined and professional actors hired to portray them in front of green screens for the TV show. Credits have never been officially available for the actors, IMDB only lists four actors for the seven characters. Most obvious was the late Rick Zumwalt, who was Sylvester Stallone’s antagonist in Over the Top, as Carolina Crusher. Long time character actor, and former American Gladiator Malibu, Deron McBee played Equalizer. Former bodybuilder and wrestler Aaron Baker was Grave Digger, and Scott James played Taurus. No credits are listed for First Blood, Invader, or Predator, and the identities of those actors remain unknown.
In the show, the characters would either address the audience (and each other) from their own realms coming out of breaks or after transition animations from the real world, usually while trucks were staging or pulling back to the pits. Each realm was appropriately themed and featured appropriate background sound effects. Some were obvious - Grave Digger’s was a graveyard, Invader outer space, Taurus a desert - but some weren’t. Carolina Crusher resided in a futuristic construction site, Equalizer a snowy fortress, Predator a back alley in a city (urban jungle, I guess?) and First Blood in a Transylvania that was on fire and, apparently, actually Hell.
The segments themselves were as over the top and cheesy as you’d imagine. Grave Digger is clearly the best here, both in writing and execution. Baker gives him an almost Shakespearean tone and his speeches are filled with macabre puns. Equalizer is similarly a somewhat restrained performance, as he’s positioned as a good guy, and McBee actually carries it with dignity. Because of the helmet, Invader is apparently voiced over after the fact, but they do a good job of masking it, and honestly, the character is mostly just waving his laser gun around and occasionally pointing it at the camera. Carolina Crusher is where things go up a level in cheese, Zumwalt growling and screaming while swinging a jackhammer, throwing his hard hat, and carrying dynamite while the fuse is lit. James’ Taurus has maybe the worst western accent you’ve ever heard, and the black and yellow spandex suit does him no favors as it looks nothing like anything any cowboy would ever wear. First Blood is simply bad, the actor barely able to annunciate his guttural lines behind the fangs, again not helped by the basic pro wrestler outfit and white face paint. Also, the segments where he squeezes gizzards up when discussing hearts (again, he’s a vampire) are just disgusting.
Predator deserves its own paragraph because it’s such a bold choice. Yes, the truck is cat themed and looks like a panther, so making the mascot some weird feline creature is justifiable. But to have the character be more human than cat, and then to have him jump around, lick his lips and hiss in a literal catsuit, is far more camp than you’d expect for the audience. Times have changed, and I think today Predator would be seen in a much different, and more positive, light, but for the time, and considering the audience, I’m kind of amazed they went in that direction.
While most of the time the characters stayed within their own realms, as the series went on they began to interact with each other more directly, and additional one-off characters would make appearances. For example, Equalizer and Taurus had one episode going back and forth about rescuing a damsel in distress. Models were also used when trucks were eliminated and the characters were shown going off to take a break and “live the good life”. The show began to get really self aware as it went on, one segment late in the series featured a Letterman-style Carolina Crusher’s Top 10 Pet Peeves.
As to the rest of the show, former Playboy model Luann Lee competently hosted studio segments, with an admittedly well done green screen backdrop studio behind her. It would have been easy for her to mail in the rather droll points updates and round recaps, but in actuality she does it well. Every episode had a music video sequence set to a reasonably contemporary licensed song, and at least one featurette, usually on a driver but also on other USHRA competitions like mud racing or pulling, as well as safety and tech topics. These were edited in full mid-90s jump cut and video effects glory. A notable episode long aside featured a pre-fame Jeff Foxworthy trying, tongue firmly in cheek, to raise money to build his own monster truck.
I also must note the sax-driven theme music, by Tom Judson. Straight up…it slaps.
On track, the late Joe Lowe, my all time favorite live event announcer, did pitch-perfect play by play from a studio. A good comparison would be Robot Wars UK’s Jonathan Pearce, just the right amount of gravitas and over the top excitement. Pit reports, interviews, and the featurettes were helmed by actor Jim Davidson. Again, it would have been easy for him to phone these segments in, especially considering he had to spend time in such lovely places as Pueblo, CO and West Lebanon, NY, but his grunge era enthusiasm captures the right tone.
It’s time to discuss the most obvious issue with Monster Wars, aside from the mascot segments. To up the excitement, build storylines, and add variety, the producers used TV magic to warp timelines and mask oddities in production. To wit: the race schedule as aired is absolutely nothing like the actual schedule the series ran that year. The first episode is at Lebanon Valley, chosen presumably because it includes the character defining moment of Grave Digger flipping over in round 2 only to come back and win the event, but the race was run in July of that season, close to the end of the actual schedule. The second episode is in Houston, back in January. This flip flopping continues throughout the run - multiple show weekends like Uniondale, Pueblo, West Lebanon and Louisville are broken apart and scattered throughout the run. This makes some sense, as seeing the same track two weeks in a row would be considered somewhat boring, but it means that the season-long points standings are kind of a fabrication. To make up for the differences at the end, the producers both had Lee reference unaired events, and even completely fabricated an additional West Lebanon episode using alternate angles of races. This episode is easy to pick out - Grave Digger bounces between damaged and undamaged from the rollover. In a similar vein, Davidson hadn’t been hired for pit reporting duties until the end of the first quarter, so many episodes feature driver interviews from months after the actual event.
Another bit of production weirdness is the “Mid-Season Invitational”, the only episode Bigfoot appears in, I guess as a nod to Ford who was still a USHRA sponsor at that point. Unlike Monster Jam today, where Bigfoot is never mentioned, here it’s treated as a conquering hero gracing the Super Series with its presence. Which is great, except that if this series features the “Best Trucks in the World”, then why isn’t the “Best Truck in the World” running for points? Also, for an “invitational” episode, Overkill, Nitemare II, and Rambo are odd choices to invite, and the mascots spend an inordinate amount of time mocking Overkill’s name (quite the thing coming from a truck named Equalizer). Spoiler alert! Bigfoot, in its phenomenal Wildfoot scheme, with Andy Brass at the wheel, wins, thus being the only truck on Monster Wars with a 100% win record.
The actual on-track action isn’t bad. 1993 wasn’t a super competitive year thanks to Bear Foot’s factory backing, but the racing is overall fun and there are a lot of memorable moments. Grave Digger’s multiple rollovers and losing it’s entire rear axle in Tampa, the excellent action at the Louisville figure 8, and, in the finale, a big upset win in the finals as mid-season addition to the series Monster Patrol knocks out the newly crowned champion Bear Foot. Monster Patrol, owned and driven by mud racer Paul Shafer (no relation to Fred) ended up scheduled for the summer and fall events, especially after First Blood’s Rob Fuchs left the sport mid-year, and quickly became a highlight. The logo used for Monster Patrol in the graphics does not match the truck at all, which is strange to me because the truck’s black and green design and lettering perfectly matches the vibe of the redesigned trucks, and you’d think they’d want to capitalize on it.
Monster Wars’ last episode was a clear series finale. The mascots were all given sendoffs, some were retconned - Equalizer suddenly foregoes the helmet to try his luck as a rock star, Carolina Crusher cries for his mommy - some were more dignified, Grave Digger going on a trip with supermodels, which I guess implies those women were planning on having sex with actual Death himself. I’m sure by that point the writing was on the wall, for numerous reasons. The show, for all its cheese, had ridiculously advanced graphics for the time, and must have been expensive as hell to produce, even in comparison to full blown arena game shows like American Gladiators. And, simply, it didn’t have the effect they wanted. Matchbox produced a toy line, but it simply didn’t sell well, and wasn’t even carried in some places. A video game was in the cards but came out a year after the end of the show. The sport of monster truck racing was coalescing around the Penda Points Series, an outdoor championship aired on The Nashville Network that had corporate support and open qualifying. For the next few years, monster trucks would tone down the showmanship and turn up the legitimacy, trying to become the next big thing in racing. Monster Wars was simply out of step with what the sport was going to be in the future.
Until it wasn’t.
By the end of the decade, Pendaliner had pulled their support from the outdoor series. SRO/PACE, now solely PACE Motorsports and promoting shows under the Monster Jam banner, had similarly abandoned their points series, and there was now no nationwide monster truck racing points championship. With the move back to match racing, PACE further aimed to consolidate things by creating their own in-house stable of monster trucks to use for shows. Their first move in this direction was bold: they bought Grave Digger. The second move was even bolder: in being rejected by Bigfoot, they decided not to book their trucks for any shows going forward. By this point, Paul Shafer had bought the rights to Bear Foot, Carolina Crusher, Taurus, and several other trucks, and he, along with other major names, signed to marketing agency Milestone Motorsports for 2000. While PACE would still book those trucks, they would not use them on their new weekly TNN primetime show. That meant using a mix of comparatively unknown independents and their own trucks to fill TV time.
The crux of the gamble PACE had made was that the legacy names weren’t really filling seats, and the performance difference between those trucks and the other independents were negligible. Besides, they now owned Grave Digger, which was the one truck that did demonstrably sell tickets. In the short term, the bulk of their in-house roster was made up of trucks with World Championship Wrestling identities, a license they had grabbed away from Bigfoot, along with a few other sponsored trucks. One exception was Bulldozer, a truck with a 3D bull body, that they had inherited after buying out competing promoter USA Motorsports. Bulldozer oozed personality in a way few other trucks did since Monster Wars ended. Not only was it an impressive looking beast, it had been rigged with an apparatus to “snort” smoke out of its nostrils, making it a crowd favorite and providing PACE (and immediate successors SFX and Clear Channel) with a template.
Over the next few years, with WCW gone, SFX relied on licensed Marvel super hero identities for a large chunk of their trucks, going the reverse from Monster Wars’ conception to largely positive reception. When a deal to make a Hulk truck out of a 1949 Mercury lowrider body fell through, SFX pivoted and adapted a more traditional concept they had been working on called Junkyard Dog to the Mercury. Rechristened Monster Mutt, the truck was given floppy fabric ears on top and a wagging tongue out the front. In doing so, they hit paydirt. While older fans initially despised it, Monster Mutt was beloved by kids and sold merchandise in buckets. A decade after trying to take monster trucks and create mascots for them, they now found success in making the truck itself a mascot. A rebranding of Bulldozer to El Toro Loco followed, found similar success, and helped by leveraging Mattel’s Hot Wheels designers for the toy line, they began overhauling even the independent trucks to great success. Not that all of the independents needed the help. Predator, with a mild evolution of the Monster Wars look, remained a fan favorite, and owner Allen Pezo even leveraged the body style to create a sister truck, the Bengal tiger known as Prowler.
One other thing had changed that made the success come easier: freestyle. One of the biggest downsides to the approach Monster Wars took is that, no matter how much trash Invader talks, or how much of a badass the character is, if the truck loses in the first round every week, it’s all for naught, and no one will attach themselves to it. In the intervening years, PACE/SFX had developed exhibition freestyle into a judged event that aired on TV. This served to help in two ways: first, every truck got 2 minutes of unabridged exposure with the audience, with the announcers able to craft a narrative about both it and its driver. Secondly, a truck and driver could be simply awful at racing but put on a great show in freestyle and still become a star.
It also didn’t hurt that a new generation of drivers was more dynamic than those who had come before, and could be interesting personalities in their own right. Guys like Tom Meents and Jim Koehler gained personal followings beyond their truck identities.
The echoes of Monster Wars are even more prominent today. Current Monster Jam owners Feld Motor Sports have filled out the truck roster with high concept designs that gain instant recognition and adoration. Pick a gimmick and commit to it - Max D’s a robot, Megalodon’s a shark, Zombie’s a zombie, Mohawk Warrior’s…hair, but hey, they got a Great Clips sponsorship out of it. Mascots have even made a comeback and have been emphasized in Spin Master’s toy line, with Grave Digger’s Grim taking the muscular reaper concept to its most extreme. All this has made Monster Jam a staple in the toy aisle for over two decades and a consistent live event and TV draw. The SRO/PACE officials in 1993 could only wish to see the success the sport is today.
Perhaps, in an alternate universe, Saturday evenings to this day are spent watching the stars of Monster Wars do battle in stadiums across America. Maybe the mascots are still barking at each other weekly, with new ones joining the fray. In our timeline, Monster Wars remains the most intriguing part of the development of monster trucks as entertainment and a media property. It may have missed its mark in the day, but the lessons learned from its rise and fall have helped ensure that monster trucks will be a part of the motorsports landscape for years to come.