Reuse, refurbish, recycle!
Please forgive me for using the same tag-line in consecutive blogs, however the act to reuse, refurbish, recycle encapsulates perfectly in what ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’ is all about! Although we’d might also need to include the terms of improve, beastify, and bling-out, to better describe what they actually do to these pieces of scrap metal.
For those who aren’t familiar with ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’, it is a Reality TV show airing on Netflix, that showcases the work of Gotham Garage, a custom car shop in California owned by Mark Towle (movie-car builder). But unlike other Reality TV shows involving custom car work (and there are a few), ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’ include an element of gamification to their work i.e. they start off with a rust-bucket car, do it up and swap it for a better rust-bucket, and on and on until they can sell their final car for a big six figure pay-day! Thus the show ties in the very first build to the very last, making the show into a very binge worthy series- unlike all other custom car shows where they’re stand-alone episodes which you can watch and just as easily stop watching.
And where most other custom car reality shows are geared for a certain type of viewer (male, male, and male), I personally believe that Car Masters reaches a wider audience because their builds are more outrageous which captures the imagination of both child and adult alike; the vintage American cars tap into baby-boomers sense of nostalgia; and having an eclectic bunch of grease-monkeys (employees) hard at work at the shop helps to appeal to a wider audience. So if you’re not into cars to begin with, I think you’ll still enjoy ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’, and you may just see four wheeled vehicles in a different light afterwards.
In Season 1, CMRtR stick more closely to the formula of starting out small and building up to the big pay-day. In season two CMRtR started to diverge away, just a little from their original game plan, due to an unforeseen incident and a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity which could not be passed on. While in season three there was a risk that CMRtR became just another ‘West Coast Customs’, where rich people bring their cars to be blinged out. But thanks to Alex, and his ever changing tastes…… He was handed back his car in pieces which allowed Mark and his team to continue on with their aims of creating custom cars to their own specifications with complete creative license. Moohaha!
Not to mention, from all the custom car shows out there- ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’ was the only title which contains Audio Description for Vision impaired viewers! So for once, I was able to more accurately envision what these vehicular works of art looked like, rather than relying on my teenage memories of cars from 20 years back to imagine what these completed cars might look like.
So if you’d like to check out ‘Car Masters Rust to Riches’, where they give tired cars a makeover!? Click HERE to start bingeing! They’re ‘bad-ass’!
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