Soak in That Nostalgic Goodness with the Original Bigfoot
If you grew up in the 80's then you are more than familiar with the big blue truck that would defy gravity and roll on helpless cars one after the other. The legend that is the original Bigfoot made a special appearance at this year's SEMA show.
This truck is going places!
Built by Bob Chandler, Bigfoot started out life as a 1974 F-250 shop truck before getting a huge lift and some pretty enormous tires added to it. Chandler had been working on the truck on and off for over 10 years adding mods here and there to the gentle giant. In 1981 the truck appeared in Take This Job and Shove It alongside rival truck USA-1 that was owned by Everett Jasmer. Playskool, the children's toy manufacturer, went and turned big blue into a battery-powered toy back in 1983 and cemented the vehicle in the mind's of kids everywhere. But this is getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Let's take this back to when Bob first bought the truck.
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So that's where it came from!
Bob needed a truck for his shop and thought this F-250 was just the thing to ferry parts around town and be able to handle whatever he threw at it. Folks that lived in the town grew familiar with it as they would often see Bob on his daily jaunts here and there. The truck got its famous name from one of Chandler's employees at his shop who commented on Chandler's heavy-foot driving style. Well, the name was turned over from the owner to his creation and the ball started rolling along. Bob and Bigfoot soon began appearing and competing in local truck and tractor pulls, in addition to off-road events. Word spread and people started to come to the shop to ask Bob to make their trucks bigger and larger. So Bigfoot grew too. Bigger tires mean a bigger axle which leads to a bigger motor. The truck got to the point that it sported military axles, complete with four-wheel steering, 48" tall tires, and a built 460 cubic inch big block V8!
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Would it be tire treads on a Walk of Fame?
After the appearance in the movie Take This and Shove It, Bigfoot became the first monster truck to do what monster trucks are known to do: crush cars. That very first car got its comeupance away from the public in the middle of an empty cornfield in the rural Missouri countryside. The only ones present that day was a small crowd of onlookers and a lone video camera there to record for posterity. Randomly, Chandler wondered to himself if he could crush two junk cars that happened to be side by side in the field. The truck not only could get up onto the cars, it demolished them without a single mussed hair!
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Still a legend
In 1983 Chandler received sponsorship from Ford for the truck and that relationship continued on up until 2005. However, with the massive success that Bigfoot was received sparked imitators and many truck owners from across the country had copied Chandler's template by outfitting their trucks with massively sized tires. By the mid-1980's Chandler had built a fleet of Bigfoots in order to accommodate the demand for the monster vehicle. The truck, despite the imitators, was still the most popular and marketable truck in the landscape. In 1987, Chandler founded the Monster Truck Racing Association, which is still going today and remains the top voice in monster truck safety. Today there are new Bigfoots out and about
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A titan of industry
At SEMA, Bigfoot stood handsome and quiet almost like a lifted blue Robert Redford with a transfer case. Despite the scuffed pinstriping and oxidized paint on the front clip, we loved it. Times have changed and a vehicle like this would be frowned upon by the normal person for what a large truck represents, but screw that. This is Bigfoot. American as baseball and sweeter than a slice of apple pie in mid-May. Would I and my fellow truck loving brethren love to see this superstar roll right over some clapped out hybrid vehicles? Oh yes. Yes, we would.
>>Join the conversation about the O.G. Bigfoot right here in Ford-trucks.com.
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