[.ca] Monster Garage: Season One

From Amazon.com:
Wonderfully pointless, enthrallingly irrelevant, the Discovery Channel's Monster Garage is a highly entertaining reality show about what it takes for complete strangers to cooperate 16 hours a day, 6 days in a row while re-tooling ordinary cars and vans into, well, really dumb but awesome stuff. Led by a heavily tattooed and likeable outlaw named Jesse James (yes, he claims to be a descendant of the original), each of the teams of mechanics, designers, and welders assembled in the first season's 13 episodes are faced with such meaningless yet ultra-cool challenges as transforming a convertible sedan into a glorified, speedy lawn mower, or turning a van into a garbage truck, complete with a container-lifting arm that extends from behind a makeshift, gull-wing door. Other engineering glories include a stretch limo adapted into a water-pumping firefighter, a sporty Chevrolet reinvented as a Zamboni (the team even gets an assist from Richard Zamboni, creator of the ice-rink smoother), a school bus reborn as a pontoon boat, and a pickup truck outfitted as a tree shaker (thus liberating many an almond from branches). Seeing these Frankenstein monster machines in action is fun, but the real kick from these shows is watching sundry loners and iconoclasts from the worlds of motorcycles and drag racing trying to get along together, and collaborating with folks from the auto industry, community colleges, and the arts world. Tensions run high, dramas become fascinating, hopes turn bleak, but somehow the mission is always met within time constraints and tight budgets. Monster Garage is good for kids, too, who discover that even outlaws need to know their geometry, hydraulics, and physics to be happy gear-heads. --Tom Keogh