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0-60 deputy editor Matt Tuccillo got on the phone with Ken Block to talk about what we can expect in the third installment of his Gymkhana online vid franchise, due to be released Tuesday, September 14, and why everyone’s been hating on that damn music video.

Let’s talk Gymkhana 3. Numbers one and two, super successful for you. Then you did the TopGear segment, which was off the hook. Among the Gymkhana vids and what TopGear did, which did you like the most?

The thing for me is, It’s always going to be hard to beat one just because it was so simple, and there were things in there that just really hadn’t been captured on film that way before – like the moving doughnuts and getting the car backwards before you go around something, so it’s like real simple stuff shot in a real simple way that’s just put together real nice and raw.

My thing with two is that I knew that with the first one I knew it was going to be hard to one-up the simple rawness [of one], so we just tried to go a different direction with it. And because DC’s putting up all this money to do stuff, we made it into the infomercial it is because DC’s got to sell some product. So [the infomercial] that was our funny, blatant way of trying to have fun and make something creative, but also work some product in there. And the general idea too was to make something that was such great eye candy that you wanted to watch it anyway even though you’re being hawked some gear.

The TopGear thing was great because they took some of the stuff they loved about one and two, mixed it in with James May and made it an adventure piece and threw in Ricky Carmichael. So to me they’re alike, but they’re very dissimilar because that one’s really intended to be part of a TV show, whereas the others were a simple showcasing of driving and some product.

That brings us to Gymkhana 3. Highly anticipated. And then you guys come out with a music video with the Cool Kids, which, I’m not going to lie, everyone seems to hate. I know any publicity is good publicity, but you feel that might have been a misstep?

Lots of stories behind this whole thing, one being that everything we do we try and have a good time with and try and make things different, and if you do the same things over and over again, people are going to get bored also, so trying to do something like the music video to me was in a way trying to one up the infomercial idea and do something in such a way that would be cool and different. But, with marketing, you can’t have a hit with absolutely everything and you can’t make everybody happy with every piece that you do. So I’m more stoked on the idea than the final execution because I feel like I really like the Cool Kids, but I feel like the track that they made for us maybe isn’t at the level that we were expecting. And I think it’s a good track, but it definitely could have been more in tune with what we do.

So it’s one of those things that’s a great idea but the execution to me wasn’t perfect. I really like the idea and I really like what we produced but I just had higher expectations for some of the components of it. And the funny thing is the paint bucket in the music video? That was actually supposed to be [Rob] Dyrdek.

What?

Yeah, we were supposed to do this thing where I knock a ladder out from underneath someone and I asked Dyrdek if he would do it and he said yeah. And he showed up that night and he couldn’t get himself to do it. So we had to throw a bucket up there. So the whole concept of that trick really was sort of this tension building, of you seeing someone standing on top of that, you’d only see it from like their calves up, and then I would come in and take it out and it would be this whole slo-mo sequence through the whole video, and Rob couldn’t do it.

Did you bust his balls about that?

Yeah, I did. And the fact was, I couldn’t push Rob too hard. I was actually putting Rob into a very dangerous position and he’s one of my best friends, so I couldn’t be like, “Rob, you’re a pussy, get on the ladder,” and then I go hurt him – I’d be in a really awkward position there, so I set up a situation that was actually a pretty tough situation and unfortunately the way that I thought through this whole video concept, that was the concept that kind of tied the whole video together and unfortunately we just didn’t have a backup plan if he didn’t do it and we only had the studio space for so long.

So it’s just one of those things that I wish would have happened. There are certain aspects of that music video that I wish worked out a little better and that’s one of them. But that’s the way it its. And the other unfortunate thing was the music video was supposed to be out only a day or two before the actual clip came out, so everyone who’s bitching and complaining about the action part of it would have been quite satisfied a day or two later, but the action part of it didn’t film as quick as we wanted it to so it took us a lot longer to do everything so we could put it together and put it out, because I didn’t want that part of it to be done unless it could be done right.