I have a medical related question. You know my toe ring? I think, I think maybe yes, I do have a toe ring. You've never had a ring. When is the last time you saw my bare feet?
Three years ago?
Since then, I've gotten a toe ring. Why I was drunk. Some people get tattoos. I don't like pain. I can't get it off my toe. And it really is did you not take a hippocratic oath? Fine? I know, Bye? I just hung up on myself or is it hanged up from gimblet media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is heavyweight today's episode Kenny. Like most, when I hear the words tale of betrayal, I think of Judas narking on, Jesus,
Brutus icing Julius, Satan cucking the Lord. But recently I heard a story of treachery that not only ranks among those, it might surpass them. While those stories merely have devils, this one has something far better. Dare devils. This story of betrayal takes place in the nineteen seventies, a time when brave men and women mounted motorcycles or got behind the wheels of cars to jump anything in their field of vision. Barrels chuck wagons, cement mixers, Stegmayer beer, truck
pits of rattlesnakes, and dens of mountain lions. This was a time when jumping a shark didn't mean jumping the shark. It was a time when daredeviling was not only a viable career path, it was something your parents could be proud of. I grew up in the nineteen seventies in
a neighborhood fully infected with daredevil fever. The older kids would lay us younger kids down on the sidewalk and jump us with our bicycles, all of us, from the older kids with bath towels tied to their necks like capes, to us younger kids with tire tracks across our backs. We all wanted to be daredevils, and the daredevil we most wanted to be was Evil Knieval. We ate from Evil Canevl lunch pails and played with Evil Canevl dolls.
Evil Canievl was Elvis, Captain America and Liberachi all rolled into one. It seemed like everyone in the world wanted to be Evil Canieval, but there was one man who wanted more than that. He wanted to surpass Evil canievel altogether. That man's name was Ken Carter, aka the Mad Canadian. Before he was the Mad Canadian, Ken was a grocery
boy with a grade school education. His dream to beat evil Canevl at his own game is captured in a nineteen seventies Canadian documentary called The Devil at Your Heels. The movie opens at a local Halifax racetrack. The crowds here to watch Ken Carter jump eighteen cars. It's nighttime, and the crowd cheers wildly as Ken Carter barrels towards a ramp in a souped up hardtop convertible. Ken doesn't make it. Instead, he lands with a crash, flat on
top of the last car in line. A man runs over to pool Ken from the car, I get an ambulance. Crew arrives and while being carried out on a stretcher, Ken waves to.
His fans, okay, take me over to the microphone please.
The paramedics carry the stretcher over to a microphone, and while lying injured on his back, Ken makes an announcement, believe.
Me, We'll be back here to more light.
At eight o'clock sharp. We'll be back here to more light. Thank you very much, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Rub on a little Ben Gay, soaked the tootsies and Ebsen salts, and hit it again the next night, for three nights every week. This is how Ken Carter makes his living. But he has plans to change all that. Ken had been watching Evil Canevel on TV for years and he wanted what Canieval had, adulation, respect, and a lot more money. Up until this point, Canevel's biggest stunt was over the Snake River Canyon, a distance of one
quarter mile. Ken Carter's plan was to jump the Saint Lawrence River, a distance four times that length a full mile, by applying a little Canadian elbow grease. Ken Carter was going to drive a rocket powered Lincoln Continental offer ramp in Canada and land in the United States, watching the
movie as a Canadian. The idea of flying through the air in a Lincoln Continental while listening to Gordon Lightfoot on the eight track player for one mile and landing in America without so much as a Canadian passport written attestation as to whether my rocket car contains fruits or vegetables felt noble. This is my dream. I don't care if I ever jump again.
But this I'm going to do.
This is my dream. Nobody ever jumped a car a mile.
That's what I'm going to do.
But right from the jump there are problems. Over and over. A date for the super jump is set, and over and over things go wrong. The crew building the ten story ramp miscalculates the measurements.
No Ken is deeply disappointed.
He was dialed into, as he says, he was dialed in to do it. There's an unexpected rain that turns the ramp to mud. The crew tries to dry it off using a helicopter. You know, I'm just coming to the end of my rope. On another occasion, an hour before the jump, the crew decides to strike, demanding twenty seven thousand dollars in cash before going back to work. I gotta budget here. Fuel tanks explode repeatedly.
Holy christ Man, what are we doing?
This goes on for five years, again and again and again. The jump is canceled. Over a million Canadian dollars are spent, Investors back out and new investors are found. Countless problems are allayed, doubts are assuaged, gotays are grown, and goatease are shaved. But then Ken's luck turns, ABC's Wide World of Sports wants to air Ken's super Jump on live
television for its millions of viewers. Before making the deal official, the network needs to send an inspector over to the jump site to report back on the stunt's viability, and the inspector they send is none other than Evil Canievil. Once Evil Knievel gives it the go ahead, ABC will air the jump, and once ABC airs the Jump, Ken will become an international star and kids will play with mad Canadian action figures and carry Mad Canadian lunchboxes.
And it reminds me of the Canyon.
How much hires this ram another thirty. It should be noted that while Evil Knevels sports the sideburns of an outlaw, Ken Carter sports the goatee of an assistant professor. And while Evil Knievel looks like a rough and tumble movie matinee idol, Ken Carter at the moment, wearing a leather jacket and a gold chain around this turtleneck neck, looks like your best friend's weird uncle in a turtleneck.
This looks like a dangerous jump to me, boy, you got no elevation, You got no.
Room for air.
Later, ABC airs Knievel's verdict. He delivers it while seated atop a bulldozer at the jump site.
I don't think i'd attempt to try this stunt. I think that the time and preparation that's been put into it is much too little. This is maybe a daredevil stunt that might end all their devil stunts.
Evil Caneval is essentially saying that if Ken goes through with this super jump, he'll end up killing himself live on national television and in doing so, completely ruined the daredeviling industry for everyone. Ken, sitting on his living room couch, watches as Evil Canevel tears up his dream on TV. I've been saying it for years. I still believe that Evil Knievel's the second best dear devil in the world. And I say that because I feel it.
I'm number one.
So I also feel that if you don't think in terms of win.
You do not win.
ABC was out This was a blow, but not a betrayal. The actual betrayal was yet to come. Without the promise of a live televised event, Ken's investors drop out. Desperate, Ken turns to a group of Hollywood producers who offered a fund his super jump with a stipulation, a safety net, if you will, they would distribute it as a pre
recorded special. In this way, the whole huge event would take place without an audience, a traumatizable, blood splashable, we want our money backable audience, which meant Ken's dream of grandstands filled with cheering crowds and tables selling Ken Carter Onesie's beer, cozies and go take homes would not come true. All there'd be was a lonely ramp, a small crew, some cameras, and Ken. Months of delays follow, and finally a new date for the super jump is set and
once again it rains. But the new investors don't care about safety. They have limited funds and just want the jump to happen. The scene opens on the jump site. We see the ramp, a group of journalists, a man holding out a boom mic, and then the camera moves in on a man wearing a yellow jumpsuit and a cowboy hat.
All right, the lights are green, and let's get ready and go.
I want to go.
The man in the yellow jumpsuit is not Ken Carter, but he poses on the ramp and gives quotes to reporters about the jump he's about to make.
I always like to stay to New York, so I'm sure I hope they like me when I get there.
The man has the same goatee as ken Carter, the same style of hair, but he's shorter, younger, and brasher.
All right, guys, my advice to get off the ramp.
You don't want no tar tracks on you.
As I watch it all unfold, I grow increasingly confused. Where's ken Carter? Had I missed something? Was some key scene accidentally cut? Finally, the voice over informs us that this yellow suited man is ken Carter's long time understudy, Kenny Powers. It turns out the investors had begun to suspect that ken Carter had lost his nerve, that some excuse was always going to pop up and he would
never make the jump. So they came up with a scheme simply put ditch ken Carter and place Kenny Powers behind the wheel of the rocket car have him do the jump instead. But first they had to get Ken out of the way, so they invited him to a fake business meeting at a hotel an hour from the jump site. With Ken Carter out of the picture, Kenny Powers steps up, and Kenny Powers really seems to be enjoying the attention. The countdown was too long. I think
it was too long. Ten second countdown, that's all I need. I'm not ready in ten seconds.
I'll never be.
Ready, and I'm gonna give it heil. Kenny warns the people of America to get ready. Staring into the camera, he instructs them to clear off their breakfast tables because when he crashes down on their roofs, it might rattle the dishes. Kenny Powers gets behind the wheel of the rocket car, the name Ken Carter emblazoned along its side, and then the car blasts off, races up the ramp, and is airborne. Let's press pause here to consider what's happening.
The idea of jumping a mile in a rocket car is completely insane, But as the car soars into the air, so soars my heart. It might only attest to what hopeful creatures we humans are. But in this moment, as the car reaches top velocity, it seems that Kenny Powers that humanity might maybe, somehow possibly make it across. But of course this isn't to be Almost immediately after leaving the ramp, the car plummets into the river. Debris flies,
parachutes open, someone screams. During his nine second flight, Kenny Powers made it a total distance of five hundred and six feet. For our Canadian listeners, that's a lot less than a mile, Jim Jam. Because the car was built specifically for Ken Carter, Kenny Powers was too short to reach the gas pedal, so we never gained enough speed. Before leaving the ramp, several members of the crew trudged through the water and pull Kenny Powers from the driver's seat.
As though the spinal injury has yet to be invented, they carry him from the river atop their shoulders bar Mitzvah boy style. How Kenny Power says, ow ow later he'll learn he's broken eight vertebrae, cracked three ribs and fractured his wrist after the jump. As Kenny Powers lay bandaged up in a hospital bed, the film's director showed up outside Ken Carter's hotel room door to tell him what happened.
Can what the hell you want?
But Ken already knows I don't want to talk to you.
Get out of here.
Eventually, Ken pulls him into the room. Why the camera crew remains in the hallway recording audio through the hotel door. Did you know about this fortune?
Look at him.
About we fade to black. Then a title card appears on screen. It reads one year later, Ken is shown sitting at the base of the ramp. He promises he'll make the jump someday, and that's it. The credits role. Some song about the power of a man in his dream starts to play, and the movie ends without ever addressing the craziest detail in this whole crazy story. As it turns out, Kenny Powers, the man who hijack Ken's car and his lifelong dream, wasn't just Ken Carter's understudy.
Kenny Powers was Ken's best friend. Ken Carter and Kenny Powers have both since died, So I called Bob Fortier, the film's director, to see if I could find out more. When I ask Bob why Kenny would betray his friend, would ruin the dream Ken had spent so many years chasing. Bob mentions a drinking problem and rumors that Kenny had gotten himself into some sort of trouble down in Florida and was desperate for a way to pay his legal fees for Bob. The reason for this betrayal is as
classic as they come. Money. The backers offered Kenny a lot of money to betray his friend, and Kenny took it. That's just the kind of guy he was, Bob says, someone who'd betray the guy who'd been supporting him for ten years. Right at the last moment. After the movie wrapped, Bob never spoke to Kenny Powers again. Kenny Powers, he says, isn't the kind of guy you want to keep in touch with. After the Jump, Kenny Powers was effectively run
out of Canada. One stuntman website even refers to him as quote Judas in a cowboy hat, and Ken Carter he went back to his old life of racetrack jumps. About a year after the Saint Lawrence River Jump, Ken Carter died attempts to jump a pond. He never achieved the legacy he'd hungered, after all, because of his supposed friend Kenny Powers. I watched the failed super Jump over and over and I'm not the only one to be
transfixed by it. On YouTube. That one scene from the movie, which has been retitled destroyed in seconds Jet Car Daredevil has over a million hits. Before that, the jump was immortalized in The Gruesome Faces of Death Too, a movie composed of boxing, ring deaths and failed stunts. Ken Carter had spent years training for his stunt, meticulously planning out
every last detail. As a professional stunt man, Kenny Powers had to have known the risk of just jumping behind the wheel like he was dipping out for drive through chicken nuggets, even for all the money in the world. He had to have known that trying to fly a rock car across a mile wide river with absolutely no training was a death mission. In a bid to better understand the Daredevil psyche, I bravely jump down a rabbit
hole of Daredevil's subculture. I watched stunt video after stunt video, and even learned the distinction between daredeviling, stunt manning and
thrill mastering. I read about important industry figures like Spanky Spangler and Spanky Junior, Lucky Teeter, Calvin Scarecrow, Shirk, big Ed Beckley, Jim crash Moreau, Stony Roberts, Daredevil, Doug Klang, Doctor Danger, Mister Dizzy, Cory the Headache Cowl, Froggy Jasper, the Clown, Walt King, Kovaz Bumps, Willard Risky, Rick Cruz, Doug Danger, Earl, the Squirrel, Nicky Mighty, Aphrodite mc Burnett, Don Snake, Prudome Levi, the Kamikaze Kid, Troutman, and Snooks Wenzel.
It's while watching my stunt videos that CEO and Gimblet Media founder Alex Bloomberg sneaks up behind my desk and asks what I'm doing research, I say, pausing a video of a flaming station wagon falling from a drawbridge. I close the browser window and open up a ted talk on how to do business, and Alex smiles approvingly. I know, folks, you're wondering, why do you allow Alex to walk all
over you like this? But I've got a wife and child now, and podcasting into a chicken drumstick on a Canadian breadline is the last thing I need at home that night, a one room, cold water flat with a screaming baby and a secondhand bassinette. I continue my research, and somewhere around three am, I stumble upon a video that defies explanation to.
Auto thrill seekers across North America, The Mad Canadian and Your Madness.
I guess that's the way to call you.
Well, I'll tell you what you know.
The video was shot just a few months after the failed super jump, and Ken Carter is back to working race tracks. Here he is being interviewed before his stunt. There's a lot of kids out there watching. Who look at evil Knieval?
Look at guys you're like yourself as heroes.
This is where I spot something unbelievable. Strolling in the background right behind Ken Carter is the man who betrayed him, Kenny Powers. Kenny stops, turns to Ken and just watches him, smiling, and then he walks out of frame and is gone. I rewind the moment several times.
Who look at evil Knieval, look at guys who look at evil Knieval, look at guys who look at evil, look at guys.
And there Kenny is, as clear as day, a warm smile on his face, watching Ken Carter admiringly. By all measures, Ken Carter should have hated Kenny Powers, should have been trying to hunt him down and beat him up. But there they were, happily spending a day together at the speedway, A betrayal as grand as the one we see at the end of the documentary isn't the kind of thing you get over, especially not after a couple months, And so I hop down a new rabbit hole and search
for whatever information I can find about Kenny Powers. According to the Internet, Ken and Kenny remain friends after the jump. Not only that, but to quote the Internet, Kenny Powers carried around an eight x ten photograph of Ken Carter, taking it everywhere he went, right up until the very end of his life. Why would Kenny Powers carry around
a photograph of Ken Carter, the man he betrayed. I promise to answer this question and possibly other questions, if you promise to patiently sit through these messages from our sponsors.
Steve Yeah.
To help make sense of Ken and Kenny's relationship, I reach out to Steve Beelock. Steve knew Ken Carter and Kenny Powers from the very beginning. For years, he spent countless hours with them on the road. You're in your car right now.
It's all hands free, so I'm good.
Steve also toured in the Mad Canadian Stunt Show as a mechanic. Back then, he went by the nickname Super Wrench, named after I assume the tool that professional mechanics use and not the feeling of sadness caused by a painful parting because I had limited time for our phone call and wasn't looking for drama at first.
It was just me and Cat for the first two years, going around the country jumping rapped the ramp, and he was stubborn. He was fair, but he was stubborn.
Steve proceeds to pull back the curtain on the version of Ken Carter we see in the movie. According to Steve, he put a lot of pressure on his crew, often requiring everyone to sleep in the same school bus as they jumped over. He aggressively booked shows miles apart, and while his team was forced to drive for days on end, Ken would fly ahead, arriving at the events in a helicopter. But in spite of the cushy travel arrangements and his mister Macho man image, things were getting tougher for Ken.
He was only in his late thirties, but in daredevil years, Ken was old, his bones more brittle. With each passing year.
Ken fractured his ankles several several times. That's why I walk funny. One jump in Tulsa, he landed past the ramp and split a sternament too when he gets a column, and when Ken was really hurt, it was when Kenny Powers would step in.
When Kenny Powers joined the show, he was a young guy in his twenties, so as Ken spent more and more time laid up with injuries, Kenny would step in to perform for him, to the point where he was doing more jumps than Ken, but still getting none of
the credit. I wondered if on the day that Kenny got behind the wheel of that rocket car, he saw it as a chance to emerge from Ken's shadow and show the world that he was the better stuntman, because Steve says, even when Ken was in top form for a stuntman, he was surprisingly cowardly.
Ken Carter was never really into speed. Okay, he did not like going fast.
Yeah, you know, there's a scene in the in the documentary where he's taken into that rocket car for the first time, and when he steps out of the car, you could see that he kind of has his his stomach is just in his throat.
He probably had to change his underwear. I don't know if you can say that on radio, but lucky.
For us, we're not on the radio. We're on a podcast, and so we could do all the cussing and the fuss and we like butter tart, liking sugarcrotch, kicking spam, dagger dorkin squacker, poo poo platter with a henous that's right, rhymes with anus case of the trots. That's just a few of the things I can say here at Gimlet Media.
He probably should his pants tell you the truth. He was scared. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind. Even when we were in the ramp truck together, he did not want me driving all over the speed linder whatsoever. He just not like to go fast.
You'd think that a need for only the legally acceptable amount of speed would be a liability for a daredevil. Not only that, but according to Steve, Ken was even scared of water. He never learned to swim, so driving off a ramp at almost three hundred miles per hour over a deep, fast moving river seemed like an odd career move.
I don't think Carter had the cohones to do it.
So you think that that Kenny Powers had had more cahonys I do. Steve says that Ken Carter was never going to attempt that jump, that it was all in act, nothing more than showmanship.
I can't believe any other way, only because of being in the same hotel room with Ken Carter for three and a half years, knowing the promoting that he did, knowing him as well as I did, I just don't think it was his intention to get into that Lincoln. I don't think it was.
According to Steve, Ken must have asked Kenny to do the jump for him, knowing that Kenny would do whatever Ken told him to, just like he always did. So to my question of how is it possible that Ken and Kenny made up and became friends again, Steve's answer is simple, they were never not friends in the first place.
And I can just see the conversation going on. Ken's standing there, going Kenny, you're going to sit in that seat? Do you think you can do it? And Kenny saying yes, I think I can. And I truly believe that Kenny powers did this just out of the love of his heart for Ken.
The idea that Kenny had attempted the sun not out of hatred, but out of love explains everything. Is what I thought for all of two minutes before realizing it made no sense at all. Don't get me wrong, I believe in love and have plenty of it. If a friend asks me to pick him up at the airport, while I never do it, I do make a point of apologizing profusely, really scrunching up my face, as though my refusal is causing me as much agony as it
is them. I'd even go so far as to say that this is because my Mama raised me right, but we all know she hasn't. But even if she had, going off a ten story ramp only to plummet to my death because I wanted to do a pal a solid for that, I'm afraid my heart as well as my cajones, are far too petit. When I ask Steve about the photo of Ken that Kenny carried around with him, he didn't know anything about it, but he says that
Daredevil share a special bond. Well, I could, of course imagine the love that unites a Spanky Spangler and a Spanky Jr. Or even Evil Canievel at his Laverda Eagle motorcycle. This fell deeper, somehow, and more complicated. Kenny nearly died for Ken. What was the power that Ken exerted over Kenny. What made Kenny so loyal that he was willing to speed off a ramp and into oblivion just because he'd been asked to? To find out, I phoned Beverly powers.
Let me give you the landline where I am because I'm in the mountains right now.
Oh sorry, after break speak, the next.
A love break.
Hello, Beverly, Yes, let me turn off the television. Oh great, okay, and the television is all.
Beverly is Kenny's widow. She grew up in the same South Carolina town as Kenny. I knew him back when he was the star halfback on the school football team when I was in.
The sixth grade. Kenny was a senior in high school, and I had a crush on him then, But you know, he didn't know I existed.
Years later, after Kenny had already been married seven possibly eight times, No one seems to be too sure, they found each other again. Kenny asked Beverly for a ride home one day and then asked her if she wanted to stay for Jumbalaya.
Oh. He was a wonderful cook, and he was a barber in the Navy. He cut my hair better than anybody has ever cut my hair in my life. He should have just stuck to barber and instead of the stunt man.
If he had, says Beverly, he'd have avoided all the pain of the super jump.
That he received a compensation for his jump was his paid medical bills.
And that was it. There was no there was no profit.
No, Kenny didn't make anythink.
No, why do you think like he chose to remain relatively in the background with Ken Carter as the.
Mean that has always been a mystery to me, because Kenny had a tape personality that was totally out of character for Kenny to stay in the background.
Well, there's a lot Beverly still doesn't understand about Kenny. Like Steve the mechanic, She's certain that Kenny attempted the jump not to betray Ken, but to protect him. In Beverly's telling, the investors were out of money and they were getting threatening.
Kenny and Ken should have never become involved with these men.
But what do you mean, I can't.
It's not something over the final that I could discuss.
You'd think about that for a while, and so I thought about it for a while. You're talking about if I can say over the telephone the mob Oh, so you're wrong. So Kenny Powers knew someone had to make that jump, and he also knew that, because of his youth and physical condition, he stood a better chance of surviving it than Ken. That's why, according to Beverly, Kenny
decided to step up. But unlike Steve the Mechanics version of the story, Beverly says there was no secret plan, no plan at all, just Kenny deciding on his own spur the moment to help his friend. And if that's true, Ken's getting angry back at the hotel might have been less about having the jump stolen out from under him and more about being scared for Kenny and angry that
Kenny would just up and try something so impetuous. In the documentary, when we first see Kenny posing beside the ramp, the voiceover explains that Kenny always wears his back brace when making jumps, but that day he'd left it behind. When I first saw the movie, I chalked it up to vanity that as he enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, he wouldn't want the brace visible under his tight jumpsuit.
But thinking on it now, how last second. The whole thing was he probably didn't even have time to put it on ten second countdown.
That's all I need.
I'm not ready in ten seconds.
I'll never be ready.
If Kenny had taken any time to consider the insanity of the jump, he probably wouldn't have been able to do it. Kenny Powers, standing alone on the ramp in his yellow jumpsuit and cowboy hat must have been terrified. Beverly says that Kenny's relationship with Ken was more complicated than just a special bond between stuntmen. For Kenny, she says, the story begins much earlier.
He was always an injured soul because of his abusive upbringing. He never could escape that as his father was a binge drinker and his father was often very abusive to him. He talked about his father swinging around by his testicles, walks through the air. I think at one instant was pretty traumatic for him.
Do you know how old he was.
It must have been before he was eight years old. I think he might have gotten things from Ken Carter that he never got from his father and that he really needed emotionally, just spending time with him is showing him affirmation and teaching him things and helping him to grow is a person and it's professional and making Kenny feel good about himself. When the car was floating in the water, even with a broken vertebrae, he was getting his self out And the first thing that he said,
did I do well? Are you pleased? He wanted to please people.
Beverly says that after the failed jump, Ken visited Kenny in the hospital and that they made amends. And the thing about the photograph that Kenny carried around in an eight by ten picture of Ken for the rest of his life, Beverly says that not only is it true, but that she gave Kenny a special leather portfolio that he used to carry it around in everywhere he went.
He had a briefcase before the end, and he used it, but he started using another portfolio.
Were there were there other photos in there that he had no just Ken Carter's Yes? Why why do you think that was?
I guess true love forgives King. He never quit loving Ken. I who love Ken?
But in the end, all that love got Kenny powers was the role of Judas in the Ken Carter life story. But while most stories of betrayal begin as love stories. This is the rare tale that ends as one. It takes guts to risk your life for glory, but it takes even more guts to risk your life for someone else, knowing that risk will only lead to obscurity and shame. A jump that big needs to be fueled by something bigger than money or the spotlight. The greatest leaps always do.
After the failed super jump, Kenny continued performing stunts on his own, but he never achieved even a fraction of the fame and respect that Ken Carter had. In two thousand and nine, Kenny died and Beverly planned his funeral. Everyone ate hot dogs and watched videos of Kenny stunts, and of course they traded their craziest Kenny Power stories.
Kenny could be hilarious. You never knew what Kenny was going to do. Kenny had a loaded down mote and he drove up into a horse barn of one of his friends and they maybe get it out real quick. He just never knew what Kenny was going to do. He had to be there.
A lot of Kenny Power stories end this way. You just had to be there. For the time he snuck up behind a friend at the urinal and kissed him on the lips, or the time he wore his best suit to visit the dogs at the town dump. It's while listening to one after another of these stories that something occurs to me. It's a crazy thought, but when I'm compelled to share with Beverly. Did you ever? Did you ever see this TV show called Eastbound and Down?
I did? And this is interesting, you asked me. You cannot tell me the writers did not know my Kini Powers.
East Bound and Down was a comedy series on HBO. The main character is a brash, foul mouthed, and washed up athlete from the South and his name Kenny Powers.
Come on raising up? Who come on?
Go too?
Look at your fucking ball?
WHI okay, okay? Where he's going to fuck up?
But it's not just that his name is Kenny Powers. The TV Kenny Powers macho swagger is eerily similar to the real Kenny Powers, and so is his physical style, right down to the goatee.
There's so many things that he said in that is just exactly verbatim what Kenny used to say.
Do you remember what those moments were in the show?
I don't think I can repeat it.
Oh, please go ahead, After all, it is a butter Tartan podcast.
Oh I don't talk this way, I can. He's say, Kenny motherfucking Powers. This example, Kenny could use a F word as a noun, verb, adverb, conjunction, adjective, all in one sentence, in every sentence of the paragraph, quite effectively.
I'm not kidding, I'm fucking in and you're fucking out. I get the fuck out of my chair.
But just after Kenny did, Yeah, my son and I used to sit and watch it and laugh it with just like Kenny Kenny. It was hilarious. It really about comfort.
To me, the.
Idea of Beverly sitting on a couch in the days after Kenny's death and taking solace in the antics of possibly one of the crudest, most offensive characters in the history of television was enough to warm my heart and my researching fingers. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for Kenny Powers, the character from Eastbndon Down. Okay, yeah, it has all of his nicknames here, the Peopil's Champion, the Shelby Sensation, the man with the Golden d c k uh doctor. Okay, some of these I can't even I
can't even say something. Even a podcast has its limits. But as I continue to read, I see that Wikipedia support it's our theory. The name Kenny Powers, it says, was inspired by a real life American automotive stuntman in the nineteen seventies by the same name. But there's no citation, no way to confirm whether it's true. So before getting off the phone with Beverly, I promise her I'll deploy all of my journalistic learnings and all of Alex Bloomberg's
bitcoins to track down the truth. Eventually, I get a hold of an executive at the production house that makes eastbounden Down. He forwards my question about the Kenny Powers character onto the show's creator and star, Danny McBride. The executive says that mister McBride quote wants to take the time to formulate a good answer for the next few weeks. I send emails checking in to see if there's anything I can report back to Beverly. Even a simple yes or no would be fine, I say, but I never
get an answer. In the end, I decided to take mister McBride's unusual response to mean that the real Kenny Powers did receive a legacy, after all, For what greater homage can a person be paid than to be immortalized in a hit TV show in such a way that there's just enough ambiguity to avoid possible litigation over the non consensual use of their identity and or likeness.
I'm Jenny Powers. I don't mean a benu.
Wayne.
You have fucking pissed me off, So I'm gonna go ahead and go. But I'm not gonna stop yelling, because then that'll mean I lost the fight. I love y'all very much. Pains out. So maybe, somehow, possibly Kenny Powers did land that jump into America after all.
Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is skeeding with the damage to poss take this moment to dissolve.
If we meant it, if we.
Tried, were felt around for far too.
Empty from things that accidentally Talk.
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me Jonathan Goldstein along with Khalila Holt. The senior producer is Aitln Roberts, editing by Jorge Justin Alex Bloomberg. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Risky Rick Cruz, Cody Glive John Bolton, Freddie Sibley, Anna Sasnowski, Lee Fordenberry, Tony As mccoppolis, Adam Simansky, Low Ann Leonard, Dick Keller, Harry Simpson, Gordon Katik, Sayid T, John Thomas, Blythe Terrell, Jessica of Weisberg, Devin Taylor, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Kate Bolinsky, music by John K. Sampson, Stephen Page and the amazing Christine Fellows. Additional music credits for this episode can be found on our website, Gimbletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by the Weaker Than's courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Hailey Shaw. You can watch the wonderful National Film Board of Canada documentary The Devil at Your Heels at NFB dot TA, follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight,
or email us at Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. We'll have a new episode in two weeks
Sun on in an Empty Room m HM