Junkyard Wars - My Belated Complaints

Ah, Junkyard Wars, how I fondly remember watching this show with my friends at the turn of the century. Recently, though, I've been recording the reruns on TLC and I've noticed some problems. It's a little late to complain, what with the American version having been cancelled five years ago, but I'm going to anyway. If you're not familiar, the show pits two teams of four people, three friends plus an expert, in a battle to build a specialized machine in 10 hours time. The show started life on UK television as Scrapheap Challenge in 1998. Discovery Communications bought the US broadcast rights, then ordered US localized episodes that ran in five seasons from 2001-2003. The original British show was shelved for retooling just this year, with the BBC desiring a daytime show with lower production costs.


When I used to watch the show in one or two episode a weeks spurts, it seemed far more innovative and fascinating. Watching whole seasons at a sitting, the cracks start to show. I think the primary issue I have is that they can't decide if it's a trick to get people interested in science, a reality show with manufactured drama, or a legitimate competition. My preference would be for it to stick to the latter. There are all sorts of things that stood in the way of the show being a fair competition. First and foremost, the experts wield far too much control. In researching the behind scenes of the show, I learned that the producers met with the experts beforehand and had them present their design ideas. For the purposes of making it interesting, the producers would then encourage them to pick different methods of achieving the same goal. This results in one team being stuck with the lousy idea and being almost assured defeat. In season three, for instance, the Geeks team from MIT was given two experts that wanted to use unconventional methods. In one case, the expert insisted on a aluminum sail for their land sailboat, which just happened to actually work, and in the other the expert wanted a water pump manufactured from a four stroke engine. In both episodes, team members suggested using the method being employed by the other team, a cloth sail and a centrifugal pump respectively, but the experts fought with them until they agreed to the crazier methods. In the Geeks second appearance, they lost because their pump actually worked, while their opponents, the Pit Crew, couldn't even get their's to function.

Reality show additions like a workshop camera for people to complain to about their team mates, putting teams with judges that have ideas that are so far out there that the team captain has to overrule them just to get things done, and instituting a rule so people can steal parts from their opponent's garage if no one is watching it reek of trying to manufacture drama. It worked, too. One member of the Pit Crew became enraged and nearly started a fight with an opposing team member over a junked car. One team was saddled with a seemingly drugged out hydrofoil racer, who proved so useless the team had no choice but to try to design his stupid plan without his help.

Junkyard Wars just doesn't stand up very well anymore for me. I've seen too much, too fast, and realized the competition is all a joke and the inventions aren't really the ingenious frankenstein contraptions they seemed to be, when I watched originally.