My first celebrity crush was not a traditional heartthrob, like Twilight star Taylor Lautner, or a pop star like Jesse McCartney, or any of the One Directions. It was the lovable moron Steve-O, from the documentary prank show Jackass.
Steve-O might seem like an odd crush for a tween girl, or for anyone. The hyperactive problem child of a high-up executive at PepsiCo, Steve-O graduated from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College before he turned to gross-out stunts and made a career of getting hit in the nuts in various creative ways. But to me, he was reckless and dangerous. He looked like Alfred E. Neuman if he spent time in a state penitentiary, but in a good way. You could tell that the party was wherever Steve-O happened to be, and that he would do anything for a laugh—or a gasp. And together with the rest of the cast of Jackass, Steve-O made one of the best TV shows and movie series of the early aughts.
So I knew I would see the most recent Jackass installment, which debuted in theaters on June 26, and probably love it. Best and Last, the allegedly final installment of the franchise, brings together the old Jackass crew, with some newer, younger additions, performing stunts, pranks, and dares that range in complexity and vulgarity. These are interspersed with iconic old videos as well as unseen clips from previous years and new material.
The first scene in this last movie is a clip of the first ever Jackass stunt—the Big Bang of the Jackass universe—performed in 1998 by Johnny Knoxville, who would become the group’s ringleader, on assignment for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother. The premise is that he offered to review self-defense equipment by testing it on himself. In the video, he and friends drive into the California desert so he can shoot himself with a .38-caliber revolver while wearing a bulletproof vest stuffed with, for whatever reason, a bunch of copies of Hustler magazine.
