Steve-O isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to the early years of Jackass. While stopping by Mike Tyson’s Hotboxin‘ podcast, the stuntman fully admitted that the show was a terrible influence on kids when it first start airing on MTV in the early 2000s. Granted, the show posted warnings to not try any of the crew’s antics at home, Steve-O says that didn’t help in the years before YouTube, and now TikTok, took over as the prime source of maniacal stunts for impressionable audiences to recreate.
Via The AV Club:
“When Jackass came out, little kids were showing up in hospitals all over the country and maybe the world because they saw us doing this crazy sh*t and they wanted to do it themselves. So, little kids everywhere got video cameras and started f*cking themselves up and showing up in hospitals and getting really hurt.”
While Steve-O owns up to Jackass being a “legitimately bad influence” and “genuinely worth vilifying” in the beginning, he says the franchise is no longer to blame for whatever craziness is happening these days. Sure, they recently pout out a new movie, but there’s a whole sea of reckless content for kids to choose from these days.
“At that time you could really point to us as being a bad influence,” Steve-O told Tyson. “But I think over the years, because now that there’s so much YouTube, Ridiculousness, so much, it’s not our f*cking fault anymore.”
(Via The AV Club)