The Original Truck From Take This Job & Shove It That Started The Monster Truck Movement

It's the original Bigfoot monster truck — the truck that turned a St. Louis carpenter's broken axles into an entire industry. In 2019, a television crew rebuilt its original all-aluminum 640-cubic-inch big block, the same engine that carried Bob Chandler's truck through its most competitive years, sitting silent for roughly twenty years before anyone tried to bring it back. It started. It idled. It pulled real numbers on a dyno. And then, not long after that moment, the team quietly took it back out of the truck — not because it failed, but because of what a restoration this complete actually made the engine become. This video traces the full arc: the "vicious cycle" of breakdowns and fixes that built Bigfoot truck in the first place, the front-end swap aimed at catching Ford's attention that took four years longer than expected to work, the 1980 movie shoot that bent the truck's frame during a racing scene for Take This Job and Shove It, the contested and never fully resolved question of who actually crushed the first car in public, and the teardown that found a welded repair and a repairman's initials hidden inside the block itself. It also follows rival builder Everett Jasmer and his truck USA-1 — a man who reached the same conclusion Chandler did, from the opposite direction, by simply never touching his original truck at all. And it ends with the strangest twist in the whole story: in 2025, restorer Terry Woodcock reassembled an original Bigfoot 1 out of parts that had been split apart since 1980, meaning the "original truck" itself doesn't fully agree on what counts as original anymore. As always, every claim here is labeled by how solid the evidence actually is — Confirmed, Corroborated, Reported, Rumored, or Stated-unknown — including the parts of this story nobody has ever fully nailed down. If you want to see more of these vehicles up close, the Virtual Garage is a free, browser-based 3D model explorer built from screen-accurate movie and TV vehicles, including cars featured in past episodes. We're adding new models on an ongoing basis, so it's worth checking back: https://retroreelrides.media/virtual-garage/ We've also opened a shop with merch inspired by the vehicles we cover: https://retroreelrides.media/shop Retro Reel Rides documents the production histories and post-filming fates of iconic movie and TV vehicles — what they were built for, what happened to them after the cameras stopped rolling, and what actually holds up once you check it. New episodes regularly. Subscribe if you want the next one. Chapters and sources referenced throughout this video are drawn from Bob Chandler's own public interviews, Bigfoot 4x4's official history, and period reporting on the Bigfoot/USA-1 rivalry. Where accounts conflict or a detail was never independently confirmed, that's stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Got a vehicle you think we should cover next, or a correction on something in this episode? Drop it in the comments — corrections get folded into future episodes and pinned when they matter. 0:00 The Engine That Defined an Era 2:31 The Vicious Cycle of Modification 6:04 The Shop That Built a Monster 11:13 The Corporate Sponsorship Gamble 17:20 The Rise of the Monster Truck 25:02 The Archival Restoration Challenge 37:42 The Identity Crisis of Bigfoot 1