Human Wrecking Balls

It was a slow night at Chez Malone last evening. We all found ourselves in the family room with nothing to do. So Mark starts channel surfing. He lands on a show on G4 called Human Wrecking Balls. The name intrigued us – I mean Human Wrecking Balls? How could you not be giddy with excitement at the possibilities.

What followed was perhaps the most ridiculous concept for a show ever. EVER. These two guys, the Pumphrey Brothers (and the name suits – you’re not going to find the name Pumphrey on any Noble Prize listing) go somewhere (last night it was a hotel suite) and destroy it. Just for grins. With their bare hands. And they have quasi-intellectual discussions about the various options for destruction (“Paul thinks I should use a side-kick, but I think a Crippling Axe Kick would be more effective here”, “A Crippling Axe Kick isn’t going to generate the force necessary to break that door.”)

I’m not making any of this up. How could I?

There are two secondary characters as well: a “structural engineer” who walks around telling us how hard this would be for us to do at home, and a hot nurse who, well, we all know why they have a hot nurse hanging around.

The destruction began with a challenge – both brothers had to destroy a vending machine and empty the entire contents without touching any of the items. The winner of this challenge got the honor of chucking a TV out the window later in the show. (Just FYI….the winning time was 43 seconds.) Once in the hotel suite, they took out the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom (they used a move called the “Powercheek” to remove the vanity – it’s exactly what it sounds like) and finally the sitting area. They brought in a celebrity guest for this part – some bass player for some band no one had ever heard of. Rock stars are all about hotel suite destruction, apparently. He had some good tips, but didn’t appear to be able to break anything himself. How awkward….

The final challenge involved taking out a wall. Not just any wall, the “structural engineer” tells us, but a wall made out of drywall and steel studs. He attempted to knock it down with a baseball bat and (surprise!) he just couldn’t do it. So the more effective of the Pumphrey Brothers was called in to do a “Shoulder Ram” – his signature move. (The less effective brother stood on the other side of the wall holding a mattress.) With a guttural scream and several well-timed commercial breaks, we finally got to see the effective Pumphrey go through the wall. We didn’t see any of the steel studs flying on the way through, but they were laying under his bruised body on the other side. (Hmmmm….)

And then, the moment we’d been waiting for all night: the TV went out the window. Followed by a sink, a fridge, a dismantled dishwasher and some other stuff that was no longer recognizable. And that friends, was the show.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall during the pitch-meeting for this one.

Mark was so intrigued that he looked the Pumphrey brothers up on Wikipedia. Turns out, they are big shots in the “competitive breaking” circuit. Who knew there even was such a thing? One of them got his start jumping off the top of a shed through something like 10 feet of solid ice. The other got his start breaking concrete with friends after school. I can’t remember which was which, but one had “crazy eyes” (you know – when you can see the whites of the eyes all the way around the pupil and you look scared all the time? He was the effective brother). The other wore the gayest looking shoes I have EVER seen – they were these white, square-toed loafer-like things - not anything I would wear to destroy a hotel room. And they didn’t do him any favors in the vending machine challenge.

The only positive thing I can say is that Team Malone hasn’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. And good news – the show is in its second season, so it looks like it’s a hit!