How El Paso Helped Preserve a Forgotten Monster Jam Moment

Anyone who knows me, is familiar with my love of Rush and monster trucks. I've been going since I was a kid & that love is still going strong as an adult. All the shows I've seen have been at El Paso's UTEP Sun Bowl and it's always a blast. Judging by the literally thousands of people who go every year, I'm not alone!

Occasionally El Paso's Monster Jam events will make tv appearances; the first being the March 1, 2008 show airing on the SPEED channel. However, not everything Monster Jam films gets shown on tv. Monster Jam usually films every (or mostly every) event of theirs to post online or, as they did MANY years ago, would post footage on home media like VHS tapes or DVDs, like the Crash Madness series (a compilation tape of various wrecks that happened at several Monster Jam events).

Sometimes they would post highlights from various events online; for example, the March 6, 2004 show at the Sun Bowl. I would know because I remember seeing these clips on the Monster Jam website, trying to spot myself in the crowd.

This show has a huge significance to me because it was the first Monster Jam event I went to, that I could actively remember. I just turned 11 years old & we took family photos of the Pit Party and the event itself. Little did I know...I somehow managed to capture a piece of "lost media" from that very same show.

I posted the only photos of Madusa's wreck from Monster Jam's 2004 El Paso show

My family took me, as a little birthday present, to the Monster Jam event that very same day. We took some photos and one of them, apparently, was a forgotten wreck in Monster Jam's history. This one:

Daniel Paulus

Daniel Paulus

For a little context...Grave Digger was racing against Madusa and Madusa ended up rolling over while attempting to make the turn. We captured the aftermath of Madusa's roll over. What's really interesting is that...as I mentioned before, Monster Jam was filming this event... but they never put footage of this wreck. (At least not that I could easily find online).

It IS possible that other people took photos (or video) of this wreck but they just haven't posted them online like I did.

This wreck was considered forgotten & was even mentioned during a YouTube video ABOUT crashes that never made it to television or home media releases. By the way...HUGE thank you to California Monster Trucks for including my photos and giving me credit for them in your video! This photo was even used on the Wiki page of this particular event so thank you to whoever did that too!

This wasn't the only time an eventful Monster Jam event from El Paso was NOT shown on tv

The March 11, 2006 show (another one I was at) was full of intense crashes; Grave Digger and Maximum Destruction would get the crowd excited but it was the various wrecks from Predator & El Toro Loco really stood out. El Paso WOULD be featured on the Crash Madness series like in Crash Madness 5, but it's a shame that the ones from the 2004 & 2006 shows never got to be shown in high quality...

If you want to relive MORE monster truck history in El Paso, you can read about the history dating back to the 80's here.

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