Putting the ‘trash’ in trash TV

Ladies and gentlemen, start your snowmobiles. If you can, that is.

“Junkyard Mega-Wars” has been retooled, with a new format, new hosts and new, permanent team captains.

Even the title has been tweaked, connoting a super-sized version of the old “Junkyard Wars.”

Fortunately, judging from tonight’s season premiere, “Snow Speeders” (9 p.m., TLC), the science and engineering are as weird and wonderfully problematic as ever.

For their first battle, a self-proclaimed nerd called Crash and his brawny rival Bowser have 10 hours to get their respective gearheads, welders and scrap artists to create makeshift snowmobiles capable of ascending a slope and retrieving as many logs as possible.

It ain’t pretty. The designs, incorporating parts scrounged up at the show’s new main set (billed as “the ultimate apocalyptic playground”), are creative, but even the team captains are unsure if their contraptions will eventually work.

Gaffes in the building process include a flying hammer head, misshapen tires and, scariest of all, one mechanic’s split inseam.

The pleasant new hosts -- smooth and gleaming Bobbi Sue Luther and Rossi Morreale -- offer innocuous commentary along the way.

The best addition, however, may turn out to be color commentator Greg Bryant, a Walt Disney Co. “imagineer” who serves as a sort of junkyard John Madden. Bryant adds a dash of wit to the proceedings while amping up the educational level.

When one team unwisely makes tires with all the threads running in the same direction, Bryant builds a model out of a toilet paper roll to illustrate the advantage of the counter-rotating concept.

At another point, he observes with a big wince, “Steering by committee -- that’s not going to work.”

OK, so this isn’t exactly rocket science, but it’s more interesting and illuminating than most of today’s prime-time competitions.

If you’re going to watch trash TV, you might as well watch literal trash TV.