In the days before the rise of the brodozer, during a time before Monster Jam and its antecedent series codified what a monster truck was, there was a curious, outlandish creation built by an ingenious Missourian by the name of Bob Chandler: a 1974 Ford F-250 with an extreme lift and ginormous tires. It was, of course, Bigfoot, and the legion of dorky, bechromed trucks with .50-caliber lug nuts and stretched tires littering the area in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center this week during the 2017 SEMA show owe it a great debt.
Chandler had been futzing with his truck for the better part of a decade, gradually adding larger tires, higher lifts, and four-wheel steering to his growing behemoth. Bigfoot and its friendly rival, Everett Jasmer’s USA-1, were featured in the 1981 comedy Take This Job and Shove It. Then Playskool went and burned the truck into the minds of schoolchildren in 1983, building a tough little battery-powered plastic toy that allowed a kid to learn about the wonders of transfer cases by slamming shift levers that protruded through the pickup’s roof. A succession of trucks followed, perhaps most notably Bigfoot 5, which wore a set of 10-foot-tall Firestone Tundra tires, taking the aesthetic to its extreme.
But the original truck is still the touchstone, and when we caught a friend on Facebook pledging reverent fealty to one of its meaty Firestones, we made it a mission to track down the mythic beast and bask in its glory. We found it in the Hedman Hedders booth, and to our delight, it wasn’t overpolished and painstakingly restored. The paint on the famous flip-up front clip’s hood is oxidized. There are rust spots where the paint has been chipped away. Pinstriping on the frame is scuffed, scratched, and worn. It’s an artifact of the 1970s and and 1980s—an important one to boot—and it wears its history proudly.
Chandler retired the much-modified pickup in 1987, continuing on with a litany of successor vehicles, which all look like, well, monster trucks. Amid a sea of cars sold to shops by OEMs for a buck, displayed at the show, and disposed of a few years later as used cars whose fashionable moment has long since passed, to spend a few minutes standing around the O.G. Bigfoot, a truck both timeless and wholly of its time, was a special treat and a refreshing tonic to the tasteless junk strewn about outside. Why, yes, hapless kid traipsing across our lawn, our shotgun is loaded with rock salt. Care to test us?
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