‘My Classic Car’ is the best show on TV for the collector vehicle culture because it reaches the very essence of the car guy philosophy.
Dennis Gage has been mixing it up with the car guys and girls for 16 seasons and counting as he travels from car show to car show and car collection to car collection.
His half hour show on Speed TV is must-see television for car guys, particularly in winter when most of us in frostier parts of the world simply hunker down and wait for spring. ‘My Classic Car’ gives us a car show every week during the dog days of winter’s icy grip and we can thank Dennis for this TV treat.
Dennis spends his summers on the road filming car guys in their natural habitat around their beloved cars and trucks, sometimes at their homes and sometimes at a local car show. Either way we get to let Dennis ask all of the right questions about the personal relationship between the vehicle and owner.
It would be fair to say that Dennis Gage was a big inspiration for mystarcollectorcar because his formula for success is actually pretty simple: find an interesting vehicle, then find its owner and you will inevitably have a great storyline provided by the proud owner.
Dennis is used to far more complicated formulas because he has a Ph.D. in Chemistry and has a storied background in the product development field for companies like Proctor & Gamble and Bristol-Myers. Dennis described himself thusly; “I really am a hardcore scientist but I am a car guy too.”
Dennis has an impressive educational background as well as a very successful professional career as a research scientist, but he wears his achievements very well in car guy world. He is far removed from an ivory tower type of guy and instead seems more like an average guy you would find at any show.
That is actually the strength of this unassuming host of one of the most popular and longest-running car shows on TV. Dennis goes against the grain of today’s television philosophy because he does not seek ridiculously contrived conflict in his show; he seeks the strong bond of community found throughout car guy world.
All of this is a preamble to that big event for us at MSCC: we finally got to meet Dennis Gage at the Rockin’ Red Deer car show while he was in town to film the event for an upcoming episode of ‘My Classic Car’. We are happy to report that Dennis was exactly the same guy that you see on Speed Channel.
He was a down-to-earth kind of guy who was more than willing to answer any and all of our questions. For example we asked him why, as an American, he occasionally used the Canadian “eh” when he interviewed car owners.
He told us he had Canadian relatives and most people think he might be Canadian, but the truth is that he is an American who really likes his Canadian fans. He told us that “he loves coming north of the border.” Dennis also told us that he “likes the stuff that’s off off the beaten path”; a fact that is obvious when you watch the unique vehicles showcased every week in his show.
Dennis told us; “I live the dream, it could have gone a different way but it took off.” Truer words were never spoken because he put everything he owned on the line when he started his show in 1997. His success is a testimony to a great car show idea from a guy who had a lot of great ideas in the field of scientific research.
His TV show success couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy in our opinion.
Jim Sutherland
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