Pimp My Ride was one of the most popular shows on TV back in the day (the US version with Xzibit, not the UK version with Tim flipping Westwood), but now over a decade after it first aired guests of the show who’d had their cars ‘pimped’ have revealed that all was not as it seemed.
One guy, Justin Dearinger, wrote on his Reddit AMA:
They actually take out a lot of the stuff that they showed on TV.
In his case, a “pop-up champagne contraption” and “drive-in theatre”.
The creators of the show defended this by saying the removals were done because having a drive-in theatre and champagne contraption made the car completely unsafe for the road. Fair enough I guess — but why put them in the air in the first place? Just for the sake of TV?
One guy also had 24-inch spinner rims they put on his 1977 Cutlass taken off after the cameras stopped rolling, and replaced with 20-inches instead.
Another guest, Seth Martino, said that sometimes they just completely faked things altogether. They’d put a robotic arm in his car which was 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”. He added:
I was very excited and naïve, so they could have told me unicorns were making me breakfast and I wouldn’t have questioned it.
Another contestant’s car literally burst into flames after it had been pimped – here’s the footage:
Contestants were also asked to re-do the big reveal scenes if they didn’t come across as excited or happy enough about their cars being pimped. One guy, Jake Glazier, had to be properly coaxed into faking an appropriate reaction for TV:
I remember this very clearly, Big Dane, very big dude, he like puts his arm around my shoulder, kind of walks me around the shop for like 10 minutes and he’s like, ‘Listen, we put a lot of work into this … we expect you to be a little more fucking enthusiastic.’
This is actually the craziest part though — the show led viewers to believe that they had the cars in the garage for a few days as they pimped them out, when in reality it was six — seven months of purely aesthetic work and of course nothing done to the actual engines.
Another guest had bags of sweets dumped into his car and was told to tell the camera that he keeps them stashed there in case he gets hungry — which he felt was them sneakily taking the piss out of him being fat:
Another told producers his grandma often smoked in his car so they got a bunch of cigarette butts and littered them around the car for effect.
What was the main man Xzibit like though? No complaints there — all the contestants thought he was pretty chill despite not spending much time with him.
He did smell of weed. A lot of it. Someone did at least, I don’t know who, but I’m pretty sure it was [Xzibit].
Sounds about right. Every guest who contributed on Reddit and in a subsequent feature by the Huffington Post said that despite all the above, they had no hard feelings towards the show and in fact enjoyed their time on it.
Geez – what next? Is wrestling fake too?
Featured Image VIA
