Between the TV series and the movies, the guys from Jackass did a lot of wild, insane, and terrible things. The guys were much younger then and maybe slightly more wild themselves. Perhaps looking back on it, they regret some of the havoc they wrought on the unsuspecting public. Not so much. Steve-O apparently feels that the only people he was truly mean to were the other cast members, and he doesn’t feel guilty at all about that.
Steve-O took part in an AMA on Reddit recently and was asked if there’s anything from the Jackass years that he feels guilty about now looking back on it. He said that nothing they did was mean-spirited, except what the cast members all did to each other. For the most part, he’s probably right. The franchise is made up of a combination of stunts and pranks, and the majority of the time the victims of both are the other guys that made up the team. You can tell when you watch them that nothing they’re doing is meant to be mean. Nobody thinks they’re as funny as they do. At the same time, we’re not sure the intention entirely absolves them here.
A lot of the time, their pranks are focused on strangers or family members of the cast. They rarely do anything that’s truly mean, but they do anger, or terrify, strangers a lot of the time. It wouldn’t be asking a lot if they were to feel a little guilty about some of that. For crying out loud, they let an alligator loose in Bam Margera’s mother’s house. Nobody feels a little guilty about that? Just a bit? Seriously, you probably should.
Much of the series was focused on stunts, or pranks on each other that were essentially stunts, and those they only took on themselves. You can’t really feel guilty if you break your own bones doing something stupid. You can feel foolish, but not guilty
While the TV series only lasted three seasons it spawned a number of films, which have been insanely big hits. The most recent was Bad Grandpa in which Johnny Knoxville put on some serious makeup and went around being an annoying old man to strangers.
What are the memorable pranks that you remember from the history of Jackass?
