What Oscar-winning actor made a rare cameo on Viva La Bam?
Which of the show's stars has been behind bars? And is it all really unscripted? If you thought
you knew everything about Bam Margera's popular MTV prank series, think again.
The officially credited creators of Jackass are
Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, and Spike Jonze, and all three have remained the heads of the
franchise throughout its existence. When Jackass stars Chris Pontius and Steve-O decided to put
together their own spinoff show, they teamed with Tremaine to co-create and co-produce Wildboyz.
It was clear that Pontius and Steve-O wanted some familiar names on board to give Wildboyz
that trademark Jackass feel. However, when Bam Margera decided to lead his own show, he went in
the opposite direction and specifically sought out fresh blood to help him bring Viva La Bam to life.
Margera co-created Viva La Bam with Troy Miller, by then already a veteran producer and director
best-known at the time as one the executive producers of HBO's acclaimed alt-comedy sketch
series Mr. Show with Bob and David. Miller not only brought along an extra level of polish not
seen in the intentionally scrappy Jackass series but, more importantly, proved that Margera could
lead a successful TV series without having to rely on the people that put Jackass on the air.
A show like Viva La Bam
involves filming a ton of footage that never gets used, as things are edited down in order
to fit into 30-minute TV episodes. However, it's not often that an entire episode's worth
of footage is scrapped entirely, if for no other reason than doing so means throwing away whatever
money was spent on getting that footage. But that is exactly what happened when the
Viva La Bam crew traveled to Iceland in order to force Ryan Dunn to back up some bragging.
According to Bam Margera, Dunn was at a bar claiming that he would've gone over
a waterfall in a barrel during a previous trip to Iceland, but didn't because it was too cold.
Bam decided to call him out, flying Dunn and some others to Iceland the next day
to challenge Dunn to do the trick in what was then a warmer season in the country.
"The very next day we're going to Iceland."
Sure enough, Dunn did it, and it was caught on tape along with a bunch of other footage
that could've comprised an entire Iceland-based episode. However, Margera said MTV felt the stunt
was too easy to replicate and feared that too many viewers would try it. So the network nixed
the episode entirely, not only never airing it but also not including it on any of the official DVD
releases of Viva La Bam, thus cementing its status as the show's infamous lost episode.
By the time Viva La Bam started airing, Bam Margera was frustrated with how much
credit Johnny Knoxville had received as a creator and also de facto lead of Jackass.
Because as Margera argued, it was he and his friends doing skateboard- and
shopping cart-based stunt videos that truly set the stage for what the show would become.
It's a sentiment he once again echoed after his Jackass Forever exit, saying in a statement,
"I created this franchise before any of these guys ever got involved."
The two would mend fences in time to film Jackass Number Two together
and seemingly remained friends through Jackass 3D,
but their friendship has since been severed yet again for reasons both creative and personal.
As proof of how Margera was feeling about Knoxville in those days, look no further
than the fact that Knoxville only appeared once throughout the 40-episode run of Viva La Bam,
which suggested that the two weren't exactly best buds at the time.
Further evidence came in the form of Knoxville not making any appearance
whatsoever in Margera and Ryan Dunn's 2003 movie Haggard, despite it featuring
appearances by most of the Jackass crew as well as famous friends like Tony Hawk.
One might assume that none of the shows that spun off from Jackass were quite as successful as the
flagship series. However, it's easy to forget that Jackass didn't actually last all that long
as a TV show. The series' meager three seasons didn't even stretch across a full two years,
and when all was said and done, only 25 episodes were produced. It might seem like it lasted much
longer than it did since MTV reran those three seasons for years afterward, especially when
it was time to promote a new movie, but the original run of Jackass was a short one indeed.
With that in mind, it wouldn't have been all that hard for Viva La Bam to outlast Jackass,
but it's still impressive that it did. The episode count exceeded Jackass by 15, ending its run
at 40 episodes stretched across five seasons. It's not hard to imagine that Bam Margera was proud to
have his solo venture outlast Jackass, especially given his feelings about Jackass and its creative
leadership at the time. If Margera was feeling competitive with the other Jackass spinoff,
Wildboyz, he also beat that series as it only made it to 32 episodes. When all is said and done, Viva
La Bam remains the longest-running show starring or featuring any members of the Jackass crew.
The episode of Viva
La Bam that featured Johnny Knoxville also had another surprising appearance:
Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn. Penn came along with his then-11-year-old son, Hopper,
a budding skateboarder who was the more likely reason the father/son duo appeared
on the show as he was probably the Viva La Bam fan — though Sean certainly seemed to be
enjoying himself as well. But it was Hopper who got his hands dirty by pouring paint on
Johnny Knoxville's car as part of a prank war between Knoxville and Margera in the episode.
Hopper is now a full-fledged actor in his own right, with numerous credits to his name.
As it stands, Viva La Bam is his earliest credit, which means the show is technically
his screen debut. Hopper's acting career post-Viva La Bam might have started sooner,
but some personal struggles — including his parents' divorce and a near-fatal
skateboarding accident in his teens — put such ambitions on hold for a few years.
But he did get back on the board and has since become a very talented skateboarder.
By all accounts, Viva La Bam was truly an unscripted show. Sure,
a lot of the pranks involved a fair amount of planning and setup,
but that doesn't mean that the victims knew what was coming or that their reactions weren't
genuine. Some of the best reactions came from Bam Margera's mom, April, who always made the
best faces and gave the best screams when she was on the receiving end of a prank. But she also
spilled the tea a bit about how it was often pretty easy to know when a stunt was coming.
Margera has confirmed that April in particular could usually figure out
that he was cooking something up when he'd be just hanging around at her house with an
MTV crew. So when she'd come home or wake up and Margera would be standing in her
kitchen surrounded by cameras and production people, she knew she was in for something.
But at least she was a good enough sport to not ask a million questions and just go with the flow.
At this point, there's little arguing that Johnny Knoxville is the biggest
solo success story of any of the Jackass crew. Not only did he front his own spinoff movie,
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, but he has appeared in multiple major Hollywood productions such as
The Dukes of Hazzard and the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. But when Viva
La Bam was on the air, it seemed as though that distinction was going to belong to Bam Margera.
Not only had Margera co-created a popular TV series, but during that time, his skateboard
line was doing extremely well, he launched his own Sirius Satellite Radio channel, started a
music label, appeared in multiple video games, and co-wrote and directed a movie. Unfortunately,
none of his business or media projects proved to have much staying power, and worst of all,
addiction really started to become an issue for both his professional and personal life.
Margera still has multiple projects going at any given time,
but he's yet to reach the heights he was poised to scale in the mid-2000s.
Viva La Bam was a successful show by most measurements. It was so successful, in fact,
that it was a no-brainer for MTV to give him a follow-up show to pick up where Viva La Bam left
off, which ended up being Bam's Unholy Union. A little more grounded than the usual Bam-based
fare, Bam's Unholy Union followed Margera as he planned his wedding with then-fiancée Missy
Rothstein, with the finale of the first season depicting the wedding in question. A second season
was in discussion, but didn't end up happening. On an episode of his radio show "Radio Bam," Margera
claimed MTV wanted him and his wife to fake a pregnancy for the second season, which they were
unwilling to do. Margera has also stated that Rothstein wasn't a fan of being on television.
It would be three years before Margera would attempt another show. In 2010 he teamed with
Spike TV for Bam's World Domination, which saw Margera, Ryan Dunn, and Tim O'Connor attempt a
vicious obstacle course. There's some mixed messaging as to whether it was originally
intended to be a pilot for a full series or just a one-off special, but a one-off special
is all it would ever be. Four more years would pass before Margera would try TV again, this
time with Bam's Bad Ass Game Show on TBS, which didn't last beyond its initial six-episode order.
"Ayla, I'm sorry but you have to go home. Guess what you won?"
"What?"
"Nothing!"
Bam Margera's first love, and what put him on the path to Jackass and mainstream celebrity status,
is skateboarding. He was even a professional skateboarder for a time, with a skateboard
line that rivaled Tony Hawk's in sales at its peak. Jackass had a loosey-goosey enough
schedule that it didn't interfere with Margera's skateboarding too much, but being the lead star
and one of the main people behind a show like Viva La Bam is a totally different story. Suddenly,
Margera was struggling to find the time to skate even for fun, and he wasn't happy about it.
His solution? To make skateboarding a huge part of Viva La Bam and have some of the
stunts involve skating and building impromptu skate parks. In this way, he could manage to
star in and run his own show but still have an excuse to get plenty of board time in,
since it was woven into the fabric of Viva La Bam. Because Jackass was born
from skateboarding-based Big Brother magazine and its fans and staff, skating has always been in
the DNA of the Jackass universe, but never was it more prominent than it was in Viva La Bam.
Vincent "Don Vito" Margera was one of the big breakout stars of Viva La Bam.
The real-life uncle of Bam Margera and brother of Phil Margera,
Vito had made appearances in Jackass but it wasn't until Viva La Bam that
he was made a prominent figure and truly became a minor celebrity in his own right.
"I want what I had! I wanna be made whole again. Gimme
what the hell I had and leave me the hell alone!"
Known for his exaggerated reactions to pranks as well as his speech being almost
impossible to understand most of the time, Vito was a fixture of the
show and one of its biggest sources of comic relief throughout its entire run.
"What do you got pies down there? Lemon pie?"
However, in 2006, Vito was arrested for allegedly having inappropriate physical contact with two
12-year-old girls. He was found guilty on two counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 10
years of probation, during which time the court forbade him from portraying the persona of "Don
Vito" publicly in any way. After the fallout of his arrest and probation, scenes filmed featuring
him for Jackass Number Two were removed, and despite appearing briefly in one scene of Bam's
Unholy Union, he was otherwise absent from the series. Don Vito would remain effectively removed
from public life for his remaining years, passing away in 2015 before his probation would've ended.
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