"Storm Chasers" Season 5 Premieres 25/9/11

Is this as good or better than Tornado road?

Min wrote: »

Is this as good or better than Tornado road?

I love Tornado road ~ it's more real people, a day in the life of determined people. Almost no scripting and no story line.

As you don't seem to be familiar with Storm Chasers then a little background. It's a Discovery Channel TV show which means massive money is thrown at it, massive content control and massive exploitation of events with over acting and disputes and fighting all carefully edited with the most stunning storm footage available anywhere.

It essentially started as a research project centring around a university professor studying advanced meteorology and a film maker who built a car that could get close to and even enter small tornadoes.

The professor with the radar truck would guide the TIV [Tornado Intercept Vehicle] to the best spots but a crazy part Irish cameraman would often ignore the advise he was getting and hare off on his own with a mixture of consequences, sometimes great intercepts, sometimes he'd have done better to wait ~ so there was always a fight with one another over something.

As the show developed each year it's popularity brought more studio control and conflict of interest from sponsors while and upstart started getting great footage time and time again an he had only using a jeep and mobile connection to his laptop and a video camera of course.

The TIV's cameraman was anxious to get a good intercept to finish his iMax film and it was looking like it was all falling apart as his love hate relationship with the university professor was forcibly divorced by a new company sponsoring the weather collection data and no longer the university ~ also there was more bad feelings raised as the TIV was on Youtube driving on the wrong side of the road overtaking traffic coming to a blind spot ~

In the meantime that upstart who had been getting the better footage came to season 3 [if I'm not mistaken] as a fully paid up meteorologist with equal billing as the other two stars and this of course caused new frictions. The upstart drove our crazy TIV cameraman totally demented when he made his own tiv calling it the 'Dominator'.

As an aside Myth Busters tested both tiv vehicles to see whose was actually better. The program changed more to a race of superior tivs with each trying to outdo the other with both technology and personnel ~ the dominator suffered a crisis then it's owner started bringing his girl friend along which meant dropping one of his crew ~ yes more tension, tears and tantrums ~ us boys of course on forums all over the world gave him some stick for that ~ geez you'd swear we were in those cars, it's better than Coronation Street.

Last year saw the Two TIV vehicles take equal billing with Tim Samaras as each crew deployed new or updated vehicles and equipment and also hire paramedics as drivers or assistants so as to aid first responders as the storm chasers were often first on scene.

This year ... as mentioned was a horrific year, in the week that over 350 people died, former AccuWeather Ankerman, Joe Bastardi, described the coming week in his forecast as wall to wall tornadoes of immense power, it'll be like hell on earth ~ it was.

I have not filled in every detail I hope I’ve left enough for you to go to Discovery Channel and learn all about the characters.

Just watched on the ol utube, scary how I was so familiar with everything, I stayed up in the wee hours live as these were breaking ~ and I knew neither got really good shots of these monsters ~ still made a great watch.

Will watch on my 42" when it comes on.

Anyone notice the changes that Tim Samaras made to his new vehicle?

As for the radar = ?????

Interviews:


'Live Footage':


So it was probably added after episode one at least.

Episode 2, well now I know why Reed was missing some of those tornados in April. Didn't know he was making a new dominator.

Managed to catch the first two eps and the prequel last night... Watching the US one is an improvement over the UK one...the narration suits better...

I actually liked him in earlier seasons...he wasn't so up his own arse and constantly on about Joel. Guy knows his stuff though, no denying that.
Always like Sean, but don't like the way it was strung out over previous seasons that this would be his last, he had to get the footage this year etc....I think the fact that DC have chucked money at this show has spoiled it slightly and the chasers themselves are now suffering from the convoys of peoplew who follow TIV or dominator everywhere they go...
Wurman seems to be out this year... don't know if that's agood or a bad thing...perhaps some behind the scenes bust up over Casey.

I think you're up next Ian, this episode has the radar fitted, and you were there then. So next episode is the one to watch.

I am personally suspecting that these guys have lost their nerve, we had predictions of massive storms and yet these 'experts' seem to have come up with one excuse after the other not to chase.

They all look burnt out TBH.

In an exceptional year, NONE of them got good footage, as one who watched live, a lot of the footage is what was online from the various storm chasers, and none of them were from Discovery Channel.

At one time I was watching you head for a storm [Greenberg I think] and Reed headed West, missing it and you drove within a few miles ~ I posted that previously and don't have any notes. But you were closer.