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  by
Billy Ingram When you spend minute after back-breaking minute in a cramped recording studio, making mere thousands of dollars a day for grueling work that can last almost until noon, the stress can get to you. In extreme cases, that stress can cause voice-over talent to veer off wildly, crashing against the walls of decency and lashing their tongues wildly at those around them.
Back
in the 1940s, a fellow by the name of Kermit Shaeffer released a series
of albums containing radio outtakes under the title
Pardon My Bloopers. The records were very popular, even though
most of the clips were totally faked (most radio was live, so the shows
themselves were lost forever, mistakes and all!).
Yeah, even the age-old classic blooper that had the radio kid show host who thought he was off the air saying, "There, that ought to keep the little bastards happy" was faked and never happened. Still, Shaeffer created an industry that grew quite large over time - in fact, the word 'Blooper' is a registered trademark and can't be used without permission. |
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"Beam Me Up, Scotty!" If you've ever been trapped in a cage with a feral animal, you know what it's like to work closely with some celebrities. They can be just as nice as can be (Tom Cruise and Chuck Norris come to mind) - others can be quite difficult, requiring you to choose your words carefully. It's true what they say (generally), the bigger they are the nicer they are - but many celebrities are looking for any opportunity to spontaneously emote. In this recording session for one of the Star Trek projects, William Shatner gets a bit perturbed at being asked to display some emotion - so he gets emotional.  KFC has revived the Colonel Sanders character in a series of beautifully executed spots (at one time featuring the voice of Randy Quaid as the Colonel) so it's time to remember the original, extra crispy Colonel Sanders. Years after he sold his chicken stores and recipes to the big fast-food boys, the Colonel was still doing their franchise television spots - he was a much loved character along the TV landscape. Unfortunately, as the crusty curmudgeon got older, he started losing his faculties, through senility or (some say) drinking. The beloved Colonel would wander into Kentucky Fried Chicken stores near his home and rant and rave about things that weren't being done his old way. They were watering down his gravy! Store managers would occasionally be forced to call the cops and have the old coot forcibly ejected. In this outake from one of the last recording sessions during the seventies, Colonel Sanders evidently had quite a bit of trouble with the script - engineers would have to piece this commercial together a few words (and syllables) at a time. Dean & Jerry!
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis let the filthy words fly when they were recording spots for their film, 'The Caddy.' Here a whole agency goes nuts - and creates a razor-sharp parody of their own campaign. "NBC, in third place in 1980, went to Joey Levine Crushing Enterprises who wrote the Proud as a Peacock jingle for them - a high energy, catchy "BIG" promotion campaign. This was at the direction of Fred Silverman (who had just recently taken over programming duties at NBC)." "From that season came such disasters as "Supertrain" and the 1980 Olympic Games were boycotted by the U.S., so there was no coverage - despite the huge sum of money NBC paid the Games Committee." "NBC continued
to slide - but, on the air, they were BIG, BIG, B I G - And PROUD! This
lead to an internal lampooning of the
'Proud As A Peacock' campaign - the recording of "We're LOUD,"
a severe parody of the "We're PROUD" campaign song." "Hey did you hear the rumor that the 'Were Proud As a Peacock' parody almost got Don Imus fired from his WNBC morning spot, after he played it on the air? I read that somewhere and was wondering if it was true." - Jason |
Imagine the stress of your own four-hour a week radio show. The pressure of fitting thirty truncated records, a billion commercials, and your own cheery observations into one cohesive package each week with only a small staff of producers, writers and personal assistants must be maddening. That would explain why syndicated radio host (and voice of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) Casey Kasem loses his nut while the mike was live and the tape was running. 
You know, that bald-headed son of a bitch, my client! Those fast-talking used car salesmen you see on TV haven't changed much in the last fifty years. In this commercial from the sixties, one of the best known hucksters on the West Coast writes his own script off the top of his head - and goes into an hilarious X-rated rant.
TVparty-ers Tom and Renee tell us, "The gentleman in the ad is Chick Lambert and his dog, Storm. I wasted some of my youth staying up way too late watching Steve Allen's KTLA-5 variety show in the 60's, and became quite familiar with Chick." "There were some others as well: Ronnie Schuken (a Keith Olberman look-alike) used to pitch for Yaekel Bros. Chrysler Plymouth in Downey, and Ralph Williams himself sold for Yaekel, then Williams Ford and later Wilson Ford (some legal troubles prompted the name change)." "Finally,
Ralph Williams actually appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson. He played a TV casket salesman, starting with a traditional
casket, but if you couldn't afford that, then... he had a fine, sturdy
pine box, and if that was a bit too pricey... he trotted out an aluminum
garbage can. The crowd went wild, and I fell out of my chair, unable
to breathe from laughing." Kids Say The Damnest Things! Working with old people is hard, but working with animals or kids can be like slow torture on a TV production. That's why you have to admire those old kid show hosts. Here NYC's Wonderama host Sonny Fox introduces a commercial for Fritos - except... oops! *#%@*! "Papa Bear" Bill O'Reilly loses it on the set of Inside Edition in this profanity laced outburst.
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Casey
Blows His Stack!
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