PLEASANT GROVE, Utah — What do you do if you have an old, broken-down car and a pumpkin that weighs more than it? The answer is simple: you get a crane and see what happens when you drop the latter onto the former.
In the video above, some of you may recognize the car from a FOX 13 News story earlier this year. Millville resident Alan Gebert has been driving his 1991 Geo Metro for nearly 35 years, and his wife's video about his loyalty to the compact coupe went viral.
Gebert, who grows giant pumpkins, had had an idea: if the Metro stopped running, he'd drop one of them onto the car — and that's exactly what he did.
"It's just something that we've talked, me and my wife have talked about for a long time, that this would be the best way for it to go, and it happened, so it's been kind of fun," Gebert said.
Before dropping the pumpkin nearly 14 stories onto his car at Hee Haw Farms in Pleasant Grove, Gebert entered it into the Utah Giant Pumpkin Festival weigh-off, where it came in first place at 1,917 pounds. Safe to say, the Geo Metro was no match.
And believe it or not, that wasn't the only instance of giant pumpkin vs. car on Saturday in northern Utah.
The North Logan Pumpkin Toss, organized by Utah State University's engineering program, added a competitive element and drew an impressive crowd. Competitors launched pumpkins with trebuchets they built themselves. There was a distance competition and a contest to see who could hit the targets (old pianos, trampolines, and more broken-down cars).
Then at the end, they dropped a 750-pound pumpkin onto a minivan. The gigantic gourd clipped the edge of the roof, caving it in a few inches — although the ratio of car-to-pumpkin mass may have had something to do with the difference in damage.
Just before that, to hype up the crowd, USU mascot "Big Blue" did some pre-damage by jumping onto the windshield.
Watch the video below:
