Paulverizer: Cyborg Muffler Man

Buena Vista, Virginia

Mark Cline (creator of Foamhenge) has built a number of Muffler Men in the 21st century (like this one in Illinois), but his 2013 "Paulverizer" is his most bizarre. Standing atop the cab of a junked truck, it holds a motorized dirt bike at the end of one of its beefy human arms, but aside from these two limbs and its head, the rest of its body is robotic. Inside its chest is a control pod occupied by an insectivore alien, who's operating the giant humanoid with levers. Mark said he got that idea from a scene in the first Men in Black film.

Paulverizer is the cyborg embodiment of Paul Palma, who owns the recycling plant where it stands. Its RoboCop-inspired head was originally modified by Cline for a Muffler Man that stood at Galaxy Golf in Nags Head, North Carolina. Hurricane Bertha destroyed that statue in July 1996; Mark salvaged the head, and it lay in the yard of his fiberglass studio for years.

In 2010 Mark was asked to play Patsy Cline's second husband in a theatrical production of her life (Mark is related to Patsy's first husband, Gerald Cline). The woman who played Patsy was married to Paul Palma. He and Mark struck up a friendship, and Paul then paid Mark to build the 24-foot-tall cyborg Muffler Man. Starting with the salvaged head, Cline created the rest out of his imagination. It was unveiled on October 19, 2013.