Motorcycle Mania 4 Review
Posted in Bike Week, Celebrity, Chopper Builders, Daytona Beach, Entertainment, Florida, Motorcycle Events, Motorcycles, News, Opinion, Television on April 20th, 2007I have to admit, I do not watch much television, I listen, but seldom watch. Tonight was one of the times for me to watch with the first airing of Motorcycle Mania 4 on TLC. Commercials, wow! Cindi commented on how there was so many of them. My answer to her, “would you rather pay to see this, or let them pay”? So with that said, in the review of tonight’s show, I will include our top picks of use of air time to pay the bills.
With just the opening few seconds of the show, I was ready to go back to Daytona Beach and do bike week again. Working during these events takes from a lot of the fun, but hey, its still a great job. One of the best things about watching Motorcycle Mania tonight was that it was filmed during bike week and watching the show was exciting for that reason.
For those of you that watched the show tonight, I am sure you could see how busy custom motorcycle builder Russell Mitchell was during the live build. However, Russell, like many other celebrity builders will almost always take the time out to talk to fans. It was a pleasure to speak with and meet Russell in Daytona. Speaking of fans, one of the highlights of the show tonight was watching Russell autograph a fans head. This was not a normal autograph though, this was done in the form of a tattoo. Though Russell claimed that he had not been on the controlling end of the tattoo gun before, he did an excellent job of signing the guys head for life.
Unfortunately, I was not present during any of the time that John Mellencamp was around, I would of like to have met him as well. He seems to have settled down in the years past. I remember seeing him live in Orlando back in the seventies where he racked up thousands of dollars in fines for using prohibited language on stage. I expected to hear more of John’s music, but was satisfied to see him do a unplugged version of “Pink Houses” during the presentation of his original Exile Cycles Mellencamp Rigid.
First good commercial goes out to the TLC reality show Real Deal where Richard Davis is trying to teach some bikers how to make money in real estate by fixing up houses. He leads in to a statement about drinking and … a guy holds up a nail gun and continues driving nails. Then a guy sitting in the class with hair standing straight up ask how long it will take for a persons smell to come back after working on a socket that the electrician left live.
Russell and the guys from Exile Cycles get ready to start the build and once they seem to have everything in place and ready to go, Russell announces that they do not have a full bottle of the gun blue stain to start the frame. Now, it appears that he will only have four days to finish the bike, were it was originally planned he would have five. No sweat, right?
Next good commercial was done by BMW motorcycles. The entire commercial was free of words and was composed of motorcycle stunt video footage. Great commercial to get your point across without saying anything.
Back to the show where Iraq war hero, Capt. David Haigh is presented a custom motorcycle built by chopper builder Bill Dodge with the help of Paul Cox and Keino. The custom motorcycle was given to him on the Hard Rock Roadhouse stage were he got to see it for the first time. I was not around during the presentation, but my hat goes off to Bill Dodge and his sponsors for showing their support for Capt. Haigh and our troops in Iraq.
Thanks goes out to Amour All for the next commercial that made us laugh while the Bud Light commercial was, well not so funny. Back to the show and the final day of the build. Russell completes the wiring on Mellencamp’s bike and wants to hear it run before he calls it a day. The crew gets the bike gassed up and ready, and with a final check, Russell touches two wires together and the engine fires right up. Next up, Russell celebrates by doing a burnout that heats the exhaust pipes up cherry red and draws the attention of the Daytona Police. NAPA auto parts follows up with a commercial full of hot rod burn outs without the cops.
The ending scenes of the show are of Russell and John riding around the Daytona loop and up Highway A1A with John Mellencamp’s new song Freedom Road playing. It was a pretty good show with too many commercial interruptions that remind me of why I do not sit in front of the television to often. It was cool to see all of the bike week happenings on TV, but I would rather live it.
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