On September 24th, 1993, early ’90s child star Macaulay Culkin released his first film attempt as a serious actor following major success with the family-comedy Home Alone. The movie, The Good Son, featured Culkin as a 10-year old child as a potential serial killer. The R-rated film showed Culkin’s character getting into various high-risk hijinks with his cousin, who had recently moved in after the death of his parents.
In one famous scene, Culkin’s character introduces “Mr. Highway,” a life-size doll they carry to a highway overpass. Henry, the character Culkin plays, eventually drops it onto the freeway, triggering a massive multi-car pile-up. Cars swerve. Metal crunches. A pileup fills the screen. Nobody laughs. The movie wanted you to feel terrified.
The film presents the moment as clearly horrific, with no attempt at humor, but the work of a young monster, not an average kid. While the scene was designed to be shocking, the writers didn’t pull the idea out of nowhere. It reflects something kids have always done: act on impulse, take reckless risks, and make split-second decisions that can easily cross the line into criminal. That includes dropping things from high places without thinking about who might be below, or imagining just how bad the damage could be when it all goes wrong.
Just one month later, on October 25th, 1993, MTV aired a different spin on the same kind of act. In an episode of Beavis & Butthead: a cartoon about two extremely clueless teenage boys named Beavis & Butthead. The duo constantly make bad decisions with destructive results that can be funny to adults with the right age-appropriate context. In the episode that aired that October, the two animated teens stole a bowling ball from their neighbor, filled it with firecrackers, and dropped it off the rooftop of a home just to see what would happen (what happened was a lot of destruction, cartoon violence, and a fire).
In the adult-comedy cartoon, the scene was played for laughs. While crimes were committed and major damage resulted from their choices, nobody got arrested, and the boys just wandered off without facing consequences. In fact, that was the main joke at the heart of every episode of the show: Beavis and Butt-Head would do things that were absolutely criminal in real life. They made choices that should’ve resulted in criminal charges for things like reckless endangerment, property destruction, arson, and theft. Instead, since they seemed too dumb to be taken seriously though, the adults around them ignored it, the boys never got arrested, and were never forced to recognize how serious their actions were.
While adults watching knew real life doesn’t actually work that way, kids who watched the show wouldn’t have had that perspective. Even if you tell yourself you’d never copy something from a cartoon, the message can still creep in: people can do reckless things, they might cause damage, but it’s not really criminal. It’s a belief that isn’t true, but one that’s easy for younger viewers to fall into without realizing it.
The head writer of Beavis & Butthead was Mike Judge, and he wasn’t just trying to invent funny cartoons. The ideas he came up for were easy to reach – he just imagined two kids who lived in a world where they act like real world kids do, but without any consequences. That’s what allowed him to come up with crazier and crazier plots for the boys.
Then, in February of 1994, a real tragedy happened in Jersey City, New Jersey. An 18-year-old named Calvin Settle found a bowling ball and decided to drop it off an overpass just to “see what would happen.” He walked to the edge of a tunnel overpass, waited for a large truck to come by, and let the bowling ball fall. It bounced off the top of the truck, then flew straight through the windshield of the car behind it. Inside the car was a woman and her 8-month-old daughter, Natalia Rivera. The ball hit Natalia in the head and killed her.
Settle was arrested and charged with manslaughter. At trial, he admitted he didn’t think it would cause that much damage. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He just acted on impulse. Parent groups immediately blamed MTV and the cartoon Beavis & Butthead, saying the episode encouraged kids to act out dangerous stunts. But during the investigation, it was revealed that Calvin Settle didn’t even have cable television. At the time, cable was something you had to pay extra for, and lots of families didn’t have it. He also made clear that he had never even seen the episode in question. He said he simply dropped the ball to see what would happen. In the end, he was found guilty of manslaughter and given the maximum sentence: ten years in prison.
The reason these three examples—The Good Son, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Calvin’s choice—sound so similar is that Hollywood writers understood something real: kids sometimes make impulsive decisions, without realizing those decisions could be crimes. That’s one explanation for why people still do this kind of thing, despite all the attention Natalia Rivera’s death got in the ’90s, including how closely it was tied to the cartoon, the fact is: They still act on their impulses and intrusive thoughts.
In one especially awful case from 2017 in Michigan, where a group of kids created a “game” in which they’d went to an overpass and drop small rocks and pebbles at cars. Each time, they kept score based on the size of the pebble they dropped, the vehicle they hit, and where they hit. At first it seemed harmless since nothing seemed to be happening with the drivers. Over time though, the rocks got bigger. Eventually, one kid chose a 20-pound stone. It crashed through the windshield of a van and killed a 32-year-old man named Kenneth White. All five teens were charged with second-degree murder, and the one who dropped the stone was found guilty. A game that seemed like nothing at the start ended with a man dead and five teenagers facing decades in prison.
Unfortunately, something like this recently happened right here in Nevada. In August of 2025, rocks were dropped from freeway overpasses in a stretch of highway between Henderson and Boulder City. Two cars were hit, and in at least one instance a driver was hospitalized with serious injuries.
If you only remember one thing from your teacher forcing you to read this article, let it be this…. Pause Before You Prank: Before you act on something reckless (especially something you know an adult would stop you from doing) ask yourself: Is this worth the risk of being a crime, not just something I can get grounded or detention for?
Every young person takes risks. That’s part of growing up. What matters is learning the difference between reckless risks that can destroy your future, and informed risks you take when you’re ready, trained, and supported. Skydiving with an instructor is an informed risk you might make as an adult, but dropping a bowling ball from an overpass would never be: That’s not an adventure, it’s just a crime, and once it happens there’s no rewinding it. What feels like a dumb impulse that’s no big deal can carry real consequences.
—
QUESTIONS:
Don’t try to “Rube Goldberg” an idea.*** Just come up with something simple, like ‘I go to play with fireworks that are left over after the 4th of July, and somehow they set the house next door on fire and people die’. Keep it simple: What can you come up with and share with the class now, to possibly stop someone from making a major mistake in the future?
***Rube-Goldberg is a term for those silly machines that turn a simple task into a long, overcomplicated chain reaction. An example would be those videos that start with one domino falling.. The domino may knock a marble onto a track, and the marble that tips a paint can which releases a ball down a slide… and that ball hits another switch… and after thirty more wild steps all that happens is something basic like a cup of coffee getting poured.
—
Be sure to provide full explanations for your answers. For more details, you can read the article this piece was sourced from here:
—
Contributed by: Mike Kamer
Light Proofing & Editing by: Chat GPT 5.o
