I have always been a sucker for manufacturing processes and I am virtually hypnotized by watching how stuff is made. It seems there are more and more TV programs that cater to my Jones. Maybe it was started by Unwrapped on the Food Network. People wanted to see how MoonPies and Red Hots and potato chips were made. Then Cliff, from Cheers, hit the factory trail with Made in America. Now you can see everything from aluminum cans being created, to skyscraper construction, to entire islands shaped like palm trees getting planted off the coast of Dubai.
National Geographic Channel and Discovery have ramped up the juice for anyone with a manufacturing Jones with shows like Man Made, How It’s Made, Ultimate Factories, and Some Assembly Required. The latter has a host not unlike a wannabe Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs.
I saw him making cheddar cheese last night. I now know the microscopic mechanics of curd is called “cheddaring” (duh). It requires a lot of salt and squeezing to get the whey out. Sharp cheddar is aged up to 18 months. Cheddar can be aged up to nine years. That would be sharp cheddar – so sharp it could knock you unconscious and peel the paint off of your car while you’re down. Nine year-old cheese is just wrong in so many ways. Yes, Mr. Python, blessed are the cheese-makers for they shall inherit the stank. And they can have it, thank you.
After cheese, the guy made New Balance running shoes. Cheese and shoes – now that is a Saturday night combination of multi-manufacturing entertainment at it’s finest. I watched every second.
How It’s Made is quite different. It gets right to the point and jams little manufacturing examples end-to-end for maximum stuffage, lining up the various products back to back to back in tandem like train cars – a veritable Pickett’s Charge of assembly linage. I couldn’t turn away.
Last night (an entire night of manufacturing at my house), I saw how darts are made. I watched as magnets were molded and polarized and teapots were extruded and silverized. I know that it takes 12 weeks to make a crash dummy and that each has vertebrae fitted with micro-chipped strain gauges for precision injury detection. Hams went from oinking to smoking to sandwiches in an eight-minute segment. I just may have a master’s degree in stunningly useless manufacturing knowledge.
Because of How It’s Made, I know the intricate details of toothpick lathing and vinyl baking and insta-freezing. I can identify a V8 engine mold from a football helmet mold. Did you know that virtually everything you own was baked in a massive industrial oven or pressed into its shape by an extruder (there are a lot of extruders on these shows) or squirted through a little nozzle at some point. I have seen it all, and the reruns too.
If you want to go commando in this manufacturing throwdown, however, Ultimate Factories is the hard stuff. No fluff, no cutesy banter. This show will grow hair on your tongue and give you an urge for hardhats and safety goggles. You like your manufacturing straight up, neat, no frills? This is How It’s Made on steroids. Ultimate Factories goes deep and puts the viewer through a full hour of how to build Harley-Davidsons, Peterbilts, Corvettes, Budweiser, BMW, Ferraris, M1 Tanks, and Apache Helicopters. You’ll need a shower and a week off to recover when these are over. I think I still have a sliver of metal stuck in my hand from just holding the remote.
From the vast amounts of TV fare like this, I am obviously not the only person who is addicted to this stuff, and it never ends. From Build it Bigger to Really Big Things to Modern Marvels and more; this manufacturing porn, these cooking shows with assembly lines and hot metal are playing constantly. And I, for one, say thank God.
It says something about American culture when people would rather watch bowling ball manufacturing than the latest sitcom, drama, or reality show.
These shows are not just entertaining; they’re necessary because they perform an important function not provided for in our modern educational system. Here’s a true example: I have a friend in a large metropolitan city. She thought cheese was a plant – like a tomato or a squash. No joke; a cheese plant. She told me this with such sincere forthrightness; I didn’t have the heart to go through the whole cow thing except to say, “You know they make cheeses from milk.”
She paused and said something I will never forget.
“So is that what you people from Alabama think?”
Yeah. We do.
She berated my political views for a few minutes and then said she had an important meeting with some top advisors – clearly no one from the Cheese Commission.
She comes from wealth. She has a degree from a prestigious university. She has a very important job. She has connections. She makes decent money. She thinks cheese grows on a plant and is harvested by illegal migrant workers in Wisconsin.
That’s why we need these shows.