“O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
—The Juggernaut
Eric and Julia Lewald discovered the viral video the way that most baby boomer parents did: Their kid showed it to them. “You’ve got to see this,” their tween son said one day in the mid-2000s, pulling it up on the family computer.
Someone had taken scenes from X-Men: The Animated Series, the cartoon that the couple had developed and overseen for Fox back in the 1990s, and transformed them into material that was very unsuitable for children. The clip featured the Marvel villain Juggernaut—an impossibly big bad guy with superhuman strength and a domed metal helmet—wreaking havoc. On its own, the sequence was appropriate enough for Saturday morning TV—but with overdubbed dialogue, it became R-rated, and the Juggernaut was turned into a spandex-wearing, wisecracking, lecherous psychopath. One bit of the video stood out from the rest: the giant repeatedly yelling, “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
The Lewalds thought it was, underneath the vulgarity, clever. “It is so gratifying to have worked on anything that other people have taken to and said, ‘I want to play with this, I want to have fun with this,’” Julia says. “As long as it’s done from a place of appreciation and fun versus snarky and nasty.” She admits that the montage occasionally veers off toward the latter, but one thing saves it: “It’s funny!”
“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” quickly became inescapable in the Lewald home—and beyond. “It was really popular for about a year or two with our kids’ friends because we were kind of a hangout party house,” Eric says. “So there’d be six or seven teenagers hanging around, and you’d hear in the background, ‘Yeah, I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!’”
In 2006, the parody racked up millions of views on what was then a new video-sharing platform: YouTube. Its most memorable joke became a meme, ended up in rap songs, and even landed in an actual X-Men movie. Today, those four words bring millennials back to a bygone internet era when young people with too much time on their hands could create something, post it, and, if they were lucky, watch it catch fire. By then, big tech was well on its way to capitalizing on DIY content, but for a short stretch, the web felt like a creative Wild West. Two decades later, with their favorite childhood cartoon finally getting a reboot with Disney+’s X-Men ’97, the two regular guys behind “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” are excited to revisit their viral moment. Of course, when they came up with the video, they weren’t thinking about being on the cutting edge of digital creation. They were just trying to make each other laugh.
Part 1: “Press Record and Go Crazy”
Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes grew up together in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. Like millions of other ’90s kids, they loved X-Men—and messing around on their computers.
Xavier Nazario (video cocreator): He would always come over and we would just hang out, play video games and whatnot.
Randy Hayes (video cocreator): It was really just to eat his mother’s cooking because it was delicious.
Nazario: I grew up with the internet since, I think, ’99 or 2000. I remember I had to sell it to my parents, like, “I need a computer. No, it’d be great for high school.” So they got me a computer through Gateway. It came with all this stuff for school. All this software and programs that I never used.
Hayes: Fooled them.
Nazario: X-Men was a big part of our childhood. That’s what technically introduced us into the Marvel Universe. X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man …
Hayes: I’m pretty sure you got a couple of wounds for trying to be Spider-Man or something like that. Everybody does.
Nazario: I remember the [X-Men] episode we used was the [third] episode of “The Phoenix Saga,” which aired across a whole week. All five episodes.
Hayes: You was lucky because your school was right across the street from the house. I had to run home.
Nazario: It was a big deal. It was such a big deal that my brother—and he’s over 10 years older than me—was asking me, “Hey, can you please record all these episodes for me so I could watch them?”
Hayes: Should you tell them that? Ain’t that some kind of piracy?
Nazario: If anybody young hears this and doesn’t understand VCRs. … We didn’t have the luxury of like, “Oh, it’s going to be on the streaming service later.” No! You wanted to see something continuously, you had to be there. You had to record it on the spot, and that’s it.
Fast-forward a decade, when the longtime friends were both living at home without much to do for fun. One day, the two 20-somethings had an idea …
Nazario: It was actually in November of 2005. Just a really boring November.
Hayes: We didn’t feel like shoveling snow. That’s what it was.
Nazario: The idea for the video came actually from watching other dubs. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Fensler dubs. They were [fake] G.I. Joe PSAs.
Eric Fensler (visual artist and filmmaker): I worked at a postproduction house. I was an editor. I went to a Virgin Megastore on my lunch break. You could just say, “Hey, can I listen to music?” You could just say, “Hey, can I listen to the CD?” They’d open it up, and you could go listen to it. That’s how it was back then. Or they’d have a station for DVDs.
The G.I. Joe movie was in there with 25 of the PSAs as bonus features. I watched the movie, and then I found more entertainment in the PSAs. I really had a visceral flashback of growing up and watching all that. And I was like, “Gosh, these are so weird.” … So that started spinning some ideas—how to repurpose them and give them new dialogue and new meaning and make art.
Nazario: And then we also watched one called Old School Afternoon, where somebody took He-Man, Voltron, ThunderCats, all of those characters, and mixed them together. I don’t know how they did this in 2005, but literally mixed them all together, had them talking.
Nazario: These things were hilarious to me. And I had editing software that I had gotten from a teacher in high school. Ms. Mohammed, thank you very much. Ms. Mohammed started my whole freaking thing. She gave me this Sony Vegas. From then on, I’ve just been on this software ever since. We had a crappy little computer mic.
Hayes: Oh, I remember that.
Nazario: I’m happy someone had “The Phoenix Saga” available for download back then because there was no other way to watch it unless I still had the VHS, which I didn’t even know if I did. So I asked Randy one day. He came over, and I was like, “Hey, you want to dub an episode of the X-Men?” He was like, “Yeah, fuck it.”
Hayes: Got nothing to do.
Nazario: That episode, one of the things you see is Juggernaut throwing Charles Xavier. Randy’s behind me playing video games. He looks at it, and the first thing that comes out of his mouth is “Yeah, it’s the Juggernaut, bitch!”
Hayes: It was hilarious to me. It caught me off guard.
Nazario: I was dying laughing, and I said, “Let’s do that. Let’s record that real quick.” And we just went on from there.
Hayes: Just press record and go crazy.
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Nazario: I think our take on dubbing is trying to interpret what we’re seeing. Once the X-Men came in, it was like, “OK, we’re going to have to dub these X-Men voices.” It’s basically me doing everybody.
I just went and took every scene with the Juggernaut in it and just recorded it. The images. The body language, the facial reaction. That’s what he looked like he was saying. “Yeah, it’s the Juggernaut, bitch!” It was perfect.
That wasn’t the only memorable line in the video. Off the top of his head, Hayes came up with several Juggernaut gems. When he has to withstand an attack on his helmet, Juggernaut says, “I got this shit in fourth grade!” And when Charles Xavier telepathically induces flashbacks, Juggernaut yells, “What the fuck is this shit? I’m tripping off acid!” None of Juggernaut’s anguish slows him down.
Hayes: He’s always just destroying everything. He doesn’t care about anything.
Eric Lewald (X-Men: The Animated Series co-showrunner): X-Men didn’t have a lot of humor. We thought it had dry humor, like action movies have understated humor. Juggernaut was one of the places we could play more than we could with some of the characters. Because of his size.
Nazario: He’s Charles Xavier’s stepbrother. We know the lore and everything because of the series. We knew how cool he was.
Lewald: The great thing to play with was the emotional stuff, the sibling anxieties between him and Xavier. It was nice to be able to bring this guy to his knees over stuff that happened in their boyhood. It’s much more fun than if he was just a skinny secondary character. It’s the Juggernaut, and he can’t deal with what happened when he was 9.
Nazario: We knew how cool he was. But it was after we dubbed the episode and created the lore of the Juggernaut that we realized, “Wow, he’s a real badass.”
Hayes: He’s unstoppable.
Part 2: “Everybody Was Loving It. Everybody Was Quoting It.”
Looking back, Nazario and Hayes acknowledge that some of their overdubbed dialogue would be considered, well, pretty offensive today. After all, their Juggernaut was a true predator. But back then, their friends thought the “Juggernaut, bitch!” video was hysterical. The response gave the duo the confidence to send it into cyberspace, where absurdist comedy clips were finding an audience.
Rosecrans Baldwin (journalist and creator of The New York Times Magazine’s The Digital Ramble blog): The platforms were new, and lots of pockets of the web were still silly and homemade. We didn’t really have social media. The mainstream media was still marveling at blogs. For those of us who’d been making—and playing on—websites for a while, it felt like another outgrowth of similar fun.
Fensler: It was the Wild West. The term is thrown around all the time, and it is actually a good representation of that. You really were on your own on this thing. And it was really just kind of, like, you’re just digging and looking and trying to find out where you fit and where you land.
Aaron Yonda (comedian and cocreator of the web series Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager): I just think it was more free. I think we all knew that there was going to be a time when advertisers would start getting their hands in it and it would become more constrained, and that’s exactly what happened. But there was this brief window where we all could basically just do anything we wanted and find people doing just about everything ever imagined.
Nazario: The humor back then was kind of edgy. It was of the time. And we were younger. I remember having people over and we were like, “Hey, you want to see a video?” That was the real test. I never expected a female audience to like it.
Hayes: At all.
Nazario: When we showed it to a female audience ...
Hayes: … they were laughing.
Nazario: In February of 2006, I found out about YouTube, Dailymotion, and I think Vimeo. It was Valentine’s Day, and I just said, “Hey, why not put this out there?”
Hayes: Let’s see what happens.
Nazario: That was it. The video just exploded.
Hayes: He actually texted me like, “Hey, you see the numbers?” I was like, “What?” And I looked and I was like, “Oh!”
Nazario: I think we hit in the millions. Everybody was loving it. Everybody was quoting it. Everybody was going crazy for it. It was amazing. It’s still surreal to this day, how quick it blew up.
Hayes: They like it. So OK, here we go.
Nazario: It was on the news. They had a segment about how viral videos and viral memes were affecting Hollywood. And it was Snakes on a Plane and us. I think we were over at a friend’s house and I was like, “Yo, what was that? They just mentioned the Juggernaut video making it into the new X-Men movie.” And I’m like, “Yo, did I just hear this?”
The report was right: In X-Men: The Last Stand, which hit theaters in May 2006, Juggernaut shouts, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” Now-disgraced director Brett Ratner was likely a fan of Nazario and Hayes’s video. In the underwhelming blockbuster, the character was basically reduced to a one-liner. But it was the most memorable thing about the movie.
Simon Kinberg (X-Men: The Last Stand cowriter, to Polygon): That was a reshoot Ratner line.
Vinnie Jones (Juggernaut in X-Men: The Last Stand, to Comic Book Movie): It wasn’t the same Juggernaut as I signed on for. They took his story line away; they’d taken his character away, his dialogue. I had two big meetings with Brett about it, and he said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s coming. They’re writing stuff for you as we speak.” And it never fucking happened.
Nazario: Word got around that the line was being added. I mean, it would’ve been even crazier if we went to the movies and it’s like, “What the fuck?”
Hayes: We’ve got to go back in time. I know we was together [when we eventually saw it].
Nazario: I think there was people clapping one night. Going crazy.
Hayes: I said I was going to say something, then I got shy when it popped on the screen.
Nazario: I think you just said, “Yeah!”
Part 3: “The Juggernaut Is Literally Connected to Us Now.”
Nazario and Hayes took advantage of the popularity of the original video by quickly making a sequel that they released in June 2006. By that fall, their take on the Juggernaut was a pop culture phenomenon. Killer Mike even sampled Jones saying Hayes’s famous line in “The Juggernaut.” The two friends had created a viral hit. But, as the story goes for so many early internet triumphs, the victory was bittersweet. They didn’t have any money to show for it. And then YouTube spoiled their fun.
Nazario: This was even before YouTube started doing revenue.
Hayes: Things didn’t change too much, sir. I was still taking the garbage out at my mother’s house.
Nazario: We had internet clout, but our lives were still the same.
Hayes: I know we went to go click on a video and a big red notification said it was deleted. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
Nazario: It started happening toward the end of 2006. Viacom started attacking YouTube and started forcing videos to go down. It wasn’t even the “Juggernaut, bitch!” that was the main thing that first got removed from our channel. It was these anime music videos I did for the Avatar: The Last Airbender show. And once that happened, it started a chain reaction that led to not only the “Juggernaut, bitch!” being taken down, but our whole channel.
Yonda: With Chad Vader, there was always the threat of Lucasfilm. So there was a bunch of time there where we weren’t even sure if we were going to be able to keep making it. In fact, we’d had the idea before that, but nobody would touch it. They were like, “Oh, Lucasfilm will come after you.”
Nazario: We had so many views and so many subscribers. I just had to redo the channel. The channel was under my name, Naztradamix. When I did it again, it was My Way Entertainment, which is still there now. It was a letdown, but it was a gateway for me to start over.
Nazario and Hayes continued to collaborate through the late 2000s. Even after “Juggernaut, bitch!,” they didn’t lose their internet clout. In 2010, at ROFLCon at MIT, they appeared on a panel with Yonda and Chad Vader cocreator Matt Sloan, as well as with Dan Walsh, the man behind satirical comic strip Garfield Minus Garfield. The phrase that the friends made famous has lived on long after YouTube took down their original video. Other users have managed to re-upload it; one such video has 9 million views. Today, Nazario works as a ramp agent at O’Hare Airport. Hayes works for his uncle’s cleaning agency. They still hang out and laugh over the Juggernaut.
Nazario: YouTube is what it is. It’s now a business.
Yonda: There were basically no restraints in 2006.
Baldwin: YouTube was intended to be a dating site, similar to Hot or Not. It had big-deal founders, with incredible tech, but did anyone envision Mr. Beast? I remember the first time I saw a YouTube video embedded on a blog—this was the era of crappy Flash—I was blown away. A lot more impressive, at least to me, than somebody doing Squid Game in real life.
Fensler: I was making art to share and make people laugh. I didn’t think of them as viral web videos. End of story.
Nazario: Back then it was a lot more freedom. I remember there was so many people who were vloggers. It was just a fun community.
Hayes: More organic.
Nazario: Now it’s just another form of media. It’s crazy because there are accounts that have our video.
Hayes: They haven’t been taken down.
Nazario: Everybody to this day is still mentioning that we should get something for that. It is what it is, man. It happened.
Hayes: I’m appreciative of what happened. It’s still part of pop culture. I don’t know what else there is, man.
Nazario: Everybody who mentions the Juggernaut, it’s “the Juggernaut, bitch!”
Julia Lewald (X-Men: The Animated Series co-showrunner): Going to cons these days, it’s still a popular line.
Nazario: I just saw this artist that I’ve been following for years, BossLogic, and he’s done great digital art. His art has even been picked up by Marvel Studios. He just posted a digital image of the Juggernaut, and on his chest was a sticker and it’s like, “Hello, I’m the Juggernaut bitch.” And I was like, “Yo, coming from the creator, to see you do this and reference us? That was amazing.” Then he found out about me and started following me. So it’s come full circle.
Hayes: It’s relevant.
Nazario: The Juggernaut is literally connected to us now.
Julia Lewald: We’re talking about him now 30 years later.
Nazario: I remember our first convention where we were guests. We were just going to go eat something at the hotel, and these guys passed us by and they were like, “Oh, it’s the Juggernaut guys. Say it! Say, ‘It’s the Juggernaut, bitch!’”
Hayes: I was like, “No!” And I went to go eat. It’s got to be in the right location. I can’t be at church like, “Hey, I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” Like, what?
Nazario: The Lord’s here!
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
