Big Brother was a skateboarding magazine founded by Steve Rocco, which was notable for ushering in street skating and promoting Rocco brands and companies Rocco favored. No subject was taboo. Early articles featured step by step ways to commit suicide and rip off schemes such as how to make a fake ID. They would often use odd gimmicks like printing the magazine in different sizes, packaging it in a cereal box, and throwing in items like trading cards and a cassette tape. Early writers were Sean Cliver, Earl Parker (Thomas Schmidt) Jeff Tremaine, Marc Mckee, Mike Ballard and various others. They also released a few videos with a few Jackass-esque stunts and pranks, but the videos were mostly skateboarding-oriented.
It contained mostly articles about skateboarding , as well as nudity, stunts, and random ramblings from its staff. Its later days were characterized by the clever wordplay of editors Dave Carnie and Chris Nieratko. The magazine was purchased by Larry Flynt in 1997. After Flynt began publishing the magazine, the nudity was toned down or scrapped altogether, though the vulgarity remained.
In one of the most bizarre episodes of the magazine's history, the subscriber list for Big Brother got mixed up with one of Larry Flynt's hardcore magazines - Taboo. Subscribers were sent pornography, and those who subscribed to Taboo got a skate magazine. This incident was parodied on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in which one of the band members was delivered an issue of Big Brother live on stage, suggesting that he subscribed to Taboo and received it in error.
The magazine was unexpectedly dropped by Larry Flynt publications in February 2004.
