Monster Jam

Well, we did it. We went to a Monster Jam show. I’ve been hesitant to do it because I knew that the Allstate Arena is a tiny place (it’s a hockey/basketball stadium) and the trucks can’t get moving as fast as when they perform in football stadiums. But I looked at the 2011 schedule and there isn’t another show near Chicago all year. I was hoping they’d do a show in Minnesota this year, but I guess with the problems in the Metrodome, they’re skipping that state this year. Besides, the tickets for Friday night’s show were only $10 each, so it seemed like a good deal, just to see one show at least. Maybe next year we’ll go back to Houston if they go back to Reliant Stadium.

So a show is 2 hours broken down like this. First they parade all the trucks out around the track. Then they do little jumps – 2 each. We didn’t catch it on tape, but Digger was the first one to do this and flipped his truck. I didn’t film it because I figured there would be more wrecks later during freestyle, but unfortunately not. That was the only wreck of the night.

After the quick jumps, some of the trucks parked in the middle and they do some Quad racing, I guess just to fill the time. We didn’t film that either because that’s not what we came for.

Then there are the monster truck races, 2 trucks at a time in a little tournament until 1 truck is the winner. In between rounds, more quad racing. By the way, those quads, even though tiny, are almost as loud as the monster trucks.

Then there is an intermission. After the break, we watched two transformer cars do battle. Mildly entertaining. Their “canons” sure were loud. The bad guy lost one of his arms as he was transforming, too. They moved really, really slow. Definitely not like the movie transformers. I think I would have preferred Truckasaurus, but I guess they need to demonstrate other oddities, too.

Finally, it was time for freestyle: the main event. This is when 1 truck at a time tries for the biggest and most specactular jumps. There were judges, but not sure what they were grading on – their scores seemed pretty random.

There were 8 trucks total there. A few were Alex’s favorite. Batman, Digger, Max D. We were told this was the first time in 5 years that Max D was back in Chicago. Monster Jam puts on 5 shows in Chicago over the weekend, but they also put on shows in 4 other states the same weekend. So there must be a lot of trucks (and duplicates) and drivers. When Alex saw the driver of Max D, he told us that wasn’t the real Max D driver – and he was absolutely right. We didn’t get the star drivers that you see on the tv show. He’s just that observant.

All in all, it was a fun night and Alex had fun. He was pretty tired, but still had a lot of fun and didn’t want to stop playing with his own trucks at home for an hour after we got back. He had to have a checkered flag, too, which he really loves waving and doing races with. Seeing these trucks live is really impressive. We didn’t get close, but just seeing them on tv really doesn’t do them justice.

Here’s a bit of a compilation of our night:

All the Monster trucks at the show

Alex and his flag

Digger was still on the field as we were leaving, so we grabbed a shot