Rust Valley Restorers has quickly become the hottest classic car repair show on television today. It has especially taken a whole new life of its own on online streaming services as the show has found an even larger audience on Netflix. People have fallen in love with it ... unless you so happen to be a car expert.
For the car experts, we see right through the Hollywood glitz and glam of the show and see the inaccuracies of the show for what they really are. Those same inaccuracies frustrated us enough to write about all that is fake on the show.
9 The Car Terminology
Anyone who knows enough about cars may see the Rust crew talk about the vehicles in front of them and can't help but notice that the dialogue sounds a little, well, simple. That is actually a deliberate move.
While much of the show's audience is compiled of car experts, the show primarily markets to casual viewers who just want to digest an entertaining show. As such, Mike and his boys clearly try their best to simplify the car terminology for the average viewer. Essentially, they dumb it down for us.
8 The Family Subplots
At the end of the day, Rust Valley Restorers is a television show. And as a TV show, as mentioned earlier, the show is mostly trying to sell itself to a national, casual TV audience who either may not know much about cars or don't care about cars as much as they care about the people involved.
As such, the show creates some superficial drama between Mike Hall, his son, and his pal Avery Shoaf. If it ever feels like the things they fight and argue about is a little too arbitrary and silly, that's because it's manufactured drama created to hook in viewers.
7 Speeding Up The Process
Anyone who has ever done the bare minimum of car repair work or at least had work done on their car knows that something as small as an engine repair could take several weeks to a month worth of time in the shop. A full-blown body repair that includes a paint job - among other internal and external changes - may take up months at a time.
On the show? They make it look like such changes take a five-minute time span. Radical changes are made without giving the audience a timetable for how long each repair took.
6 Exaggerating For The Camera
They say that when someone knows they are on camera, it is hard to get a 100% genuine reaction out of them. Either the person shies away from being their true selves, or they amp up their personalities to 11 in order to look eccentric on camera.
You often see this case clearly with the Rust crew. Even if neither of these men actually get a script in hand or further instructions off-screen from producers, they do often exaggerate to put on a character persona for the camera.
5 The Unwritten Rule Of Restoration
There is an unwritten rule when it comes to car restorations that car restorers are supposed to paint each vehicle they re-design with muted, dark, quote-on-quote "normal" colors to make a profit more likely. Make it a color that the average seller would be attracted to.
In the first episode, the Rust crew painted an old Dart Swinger with a hot pink color scheme. Unless they got previous instructions from a potential buyer (or, say, a producer promising a profit), this was a risky move. Either they got lucky in managing to sell it, or it was all part of the plan.
4 Speaking Of That Dart Swinger...
One thing that stood out to a lot of folks, including Jerry Sutherland of My Star Collector Car, is that during that first episode when Mike Hall and his crew repaired the Dart Swinger, they opted to restore the model to its factory-correct version.
However, they did so with a 318 engine underneath the hood of a car that clearly has a 340 emblem. As Sutherland pointed out, using a 318 engine on a 340 vehicle is just asking for trouble.
3 Mike Hall Was Already A Reality Star
One fact that often goes overlooked about the show's star is that this is not the first reality show that Mike Hall has ever been a part of. Previously, long before Rust Valley Restorers ever even went into production, he appeared on Highway Thru Hell, a show all about a rescue and recovery truck towing company.
In Mike's episode, he talked about being on the verge of selling a five-acre piece of land filled with 340 cars. A producer heard it when the story went viral and decided to pitch a show idea to Mike. That show idea became Rust Valley Restorers.
2 The Father-Son Dynamic
This ties together to both the exaggeration entry and even the entry about family subplots. The show and its cast need to manufacture drama surrounding the slightest of inconveniences and turn them into major storylines in order to grip its audience.
This is especially the case between Mike Hall and his son Connor. The two often seem to be at each other's throats, often regarding money and going over budget or conflicting ideas over how to fix a car. It'd be easy to assume they just have a bad relationship but in reality, they couldn't be closer.
1 Financial Woes
We hear a lot about Mike Hall's so-called financial woes on the show. We hear about how he struggles to make a profit from remodeling cars because he always goes over budget when he works on cars.
It seems like a deliberate way for the show to create drama and sympathy for Mike Hall, but it is hard to feel too bad for him or believe he is in any kind of financial trouble when we know just how lucrative television contracts are. Hall's reported net worth currently stands at $5 million.