Twenty years after they were first uploaded to YouTube, filmmaker Gunnar Stansson is giving his most extensive account yet of how the infamous Unforgivable video series came together.
Stansson, who starred as Ricky in the absurdist grayscale YouTube videos shot in the woods, sat for a full retrospective with Steve Macfarlane the writer’s Element X Substack.
Now 39, Stansson recalled the idea for the early YouTube hit came from a 2005 Sean “Diddy” Combs ad for his “Unforgivable” fragrance, which at the time was the center of controversy over its imagery.
Stansson then called up his friend Logan Hodge—another aspiring filmmaker whom he had met in high school and introduced him to N.W.A.—to see if he had watched the commercial. Days later, Hodge called back and asked, “You wanna film something?”
“There was never a script, or a conversation, like, ‘Let’s film Unforgivable Part 1!’ I just kinda found myself channeling [Ice] Cube, coming up with a story, and we start coming up with the most farcical things we can think of,” Stansson said. “That’s really how it started. Logan with the camcorder, I’m recounting tales in the woods. The first four were all shot in the woods to the side of Logan’s family property.”
Stansson said they “never” made the Unforgivable videos with the intention of uploading them.
“We thought it was going to be for our little friend group. Not even 10 people were supposed to see them. But the reaction from our friends, Logan saw something there. He was a really enterprising person, you know?” he said. “He saw an opportunity there. He really did peer into the future. I didn’t even know YouTube existed. I was reticent.”
Stansson, who believed they would get in trouble for the videos, recalled that they never made an official decision to take the clips live. Hodge uploaded the first video on Aug. 22, 2006.
“That was his executive decision. I don’t recall how I found out but I was really, really upset with Logan,” Stansson said.
What followed was the strange machinery of early-aughts YouTube fame: meetings in New York, with the two put up at the W Hotel in Midtown; a manager named John Shapiro, who also handled Sean Kingston, pitching a project called The Urban Jackass; and a sit-down with Dame Dash at his TriBeCa loft.
Stansson said by 2008, they were working with Kevin Khandjian of District Lines on merchandise, and the T-shirts reached Hot Topic.
That same year, the budding filmmakers moved to Putnam Valley in New York, where they lived with a manager for about a year before returning home to Texarkana, Texas.
The last Unforgivable video went up in 2011, with Ricky recast as a man of faith renouncing everything he had previously bragged about.
“It was supposed to our big ‘screw you’ to all the people who were demanding Unforgivable all the time,” Stansson said. “‘Let’s randomly mock these people who just won't let us do anything new.’ Which is why, at the end of that one, when the Ricky character finishes, there’s a freeze-frame, and it comes back: ‘With some waffle fries.’”
Hodge later reinvented himself as AEROBIZ, producing music during the Texas cloud-rap scene of the 2010s. After years of battling addiction and substance abuse, Hodge died in 2018 at age 30.
“Logan is the best man I’ve ever met, the sweetest man I’ve ever met, the most non-judgmental person I’ve ever met, the most giving person I’ve ever met. He had a wealth of knowledge about many different things. And in my opinion, he was the consummate auteur. The real deal,” he said.
Stansson later added, “When he first put Unforgivable online, Logan’s whole thing was, ‘This is going to be the way by which people become discovered. And we want to be filmmakers. You’re joining me in this.’ His death really showed me something I didn’t see before, about friendship and about ambition.”
Stansson, who now works at an engineering consultancy company, says he gets “approached or recognized at least a handful of times every year.” He previously discussed the origins of Unforgivable in a 2011 interview.
As of 2026, the first four Unforgivable videos have a combined 64 million views on the Hodge Stansson YouTube account.
