Now Watching: Project Grizzly

Let’s talk about this American Canadian hero, Troy Hurtubise. 

Early in his life, this man survived an encounter with a Grizzly bear. Most people would simply count themselves lucky and proceed to spend forever away from the woods. Troy is not most people. Troy wants to make a goddamn grizzly suit. 

This documentary is primarily for the freak factor. You want to sit and watch this guy let his buddies swing giant suspended logs at him while he’s wearing what looks like a giant trash can. It is actually his life-long work: the Ursus Mark VI. 

As amusing as all that that is, Project Grizzly is also a fascinating character study—at least that’s what you can tell people when you want to justify watching this for reasons other than “holy shit that guy is crazy how fucking great is this I think he’s a hero.” 

I had a lot of fun pretending that Troy was sort of like Canada’s answer to Tony Stark, and just as Tony is ever-perfecting his Iron Man armor, so Troy toils and toils over the Ursus, until he will one day achieve his dream. 

His dream, I guess, is to get the shit kicked out of him by a Grizzly. Not sure if he’d be the greatest addition to the Avengers, but who am I to judge.