Bad News Everyone, Pimp My Ride Was Fake
(Source) “Pimp My Ride” premiered on MTV in 2004 with a straightforward premise that was beautiful in its simplicity: Take a kid with a beat up car and have the rapper Xzibit orchestrate a massive and ridiculous upgrade. The theme song explained it all in just a few lines: “So you wanna be a player, but your wheels ain’t fine / You gotta hit us up, to get a pimp’t out ride.” But although the show operated within such a minimal framework, things were a bit more complicated behind the scenes. From cars that would break down in a matter of weeks to fat-shaming a contestant to one MTV employee apparently trying to convince another car owner to break up with his girlfriend, there was a lot more to the creation of this show than Xzibit simply saying, “Yo dawg.”
The Huffington Post spoke with three of the kids who got their cars pimped: Jake Glazier from Season 4 and Seth Martino and Justin Dearinger from Season 6. All three had previously done brief AMAs on Reddit about their time on the show. (It should be noted that each appeared on “Pimp My Ride” near the later half of its run.) And for a perspective from the other side of the camera, co-executive producer Larry Hochberg responded to a few of the claims made by contestants.
Although all of the people spoken to about “Pimp My Ride” ultimately had mostly positive experiences, the reality of what it took to get pimped ended up being even more strange than expected. “I was very excited and naïve, so they could have told me unicorns were making me breakfast and I wouldn’t have questioned it,” Martino said. Viewers of this aughts-spectacle ended up having the same experience …
In Justin Dearinger’s Reddit AMA, he claimed that “they actually take out a lot of the stuff that they showed on TV,” such as in his case, a “pop-up” champagne contraption and a “drive-in theater.” Further explaining to HuffPost, Dearinger said that they removed the champagne part because the show didn’t want to condone drinking and driving. The theater was removed for not being street safe.
According to Larry Hochberg, however, the removals were done with a specific purpose in mind. “Sometimes we did things for safety reasons that the kids on show interpreted as us ‘taking away’ some items,” he said. He gave an example where 24-inch spinner rims on a 1977 Cutlass would look amazing for television, but “out of abundance of caution” they’d end up switching the spinners to “beautiful 20s for daily driving.” That said, it seems as if things were occasionally put into cars with no intention of them ever working in real life. For example, a robotic arm installed into Seth Martino’s car was, as he put it, actually solely “controlled by commands that were entered into a laptop by the spiky haired guy off screen.” In reality, it “was just a robotic arm with a bunch of wires hanging out of it.”
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You guys knew this right? We all TOTALLY knew this. Fake from day 1. Who didn’t know this? Who actually thought X-Zibit and his team of Mexican car guys were putting turntables and champagne fountains in the back of Honda Civics. HA! Who would be that dumb right? Man, some people can be fooled by ANYTHING. Probably think wrestling is real too. Bunch of dummies.
*Softly weeps at my computer*
PS
The guy who’s car spontaneously burst into flames after it being pimped is kind of funny. Sorry bro, price of being Fly as fuck.
A contestant named Justin Dearinger told HuffPo that years later—and after he’d done extensive work to the car on his own—his pimped ride spontaneously burst into flames while he was driving it. He even took video.