The worst Monster Jam event

Like many (most?) parents of a young American child, a not-insignificant portion of my partner and I’s daily/weekly lives are spent talking about, looking at or watching monster trucks. Specifically, the Monster Jam-branded monster trucks that feature Grave Digger and others you may be familiar with. (Although not Bigfoot, who is only part of monster truck events run by Hot Wheels or the occasional independent event. I know this because I have a five-year-old son.)

So this past Sunday, we and some other family took our son to his fourth Monster Jam event. We’ve done two in an arena (Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles) and this was our second in a stadium (both at Angel Stadium in Anaheim). The arena shows and the stadium shows are extremely different beasts. The arena shows are mapped out to the minute and held to a strict schedule, with a maximum of eight trucks in competition. It’s a blisteringly efficient couple of hours of entertainment, with no fat and no wasted space.

The stadium shows, by stark contrast, can often be all-day affairs, kicked off with an optional, additional-ticket-required “pit party” beforehand, 12 or more trucks competing, a bigger track, longer heats and leeway to really spread things out and, apparently, allow for things to go wrong.

So did things go wrong at this stadium show? You know what, dear reader? They did.

This was the second day of a two-day event and the fourth and final Anaheim stadium show in the past two months. Note to self: if I ever go to another Monster Jam stadium show, don’t make it the very last one.

We skipped the pit party this time around, as our son definitely is in no state of mind currently to have to wait in lines for anything, and there was no need to make our long day even longer. Our son’s favorite monster truck, who he has many times referred to as “my best friend,” is El Toro Loco. He was wearing his El Toro Loco shirt and hat (he wears an El Toro Loco hat every day of his life and wouldn’t take it off for photo day at kindergarten) already on edge because they’ve redesigned the body shape of his all-time favorite monster truck for 2025 and still isn’t used to it, so keep THAT in mind as you read through this list of things that went incorrectly at Monster Jam.

1. The event started over half an hour late, which I would later understand to have been a grave portent. As I mentioned before, the timing of the stadium shows are elastic, but when you’re attending with a kid who’s expecting to see some friggin’ monster trucks already, half an hour is a real long time to wait. At least we all rushed to get inside and in our seats on time!
2. When the trucks emerged from the tunnel to be introduced, one of the trucks (Excaliber) was missing a couple of its body panels, and Jester — a truck my son was really excited about seeing, in part because he’d never seen it live before — was missing its fiberglass body entirely, having trashed it the day before, and was only present as a bare metal frame. This kicked off the next three hours of my son asking me what happened to Jester and whether he’d be able to be fixed.

Paid subscribers get to read the rest of this tragic tale.