Kermit Schaefer and "Dumas" Followup
Re my comment to a satirical Annika blog post (see here for context):
Boy im a dumas. which reminds me of a kermit shafer joke, not kermit the frog, kermit shafer he wuz kewl he did bloopers before dick clark who is the old guy who looks yung.
I found the actual text of the "Dumas" blooper in a cache:
Game Show Host: "Can you name the author of the Three Musketteers?"
Game Show Contestant: "Oh! Alexander Dumbass. Oh Henry Dumbass!"
A little bit more on Kermit Schaefer:
Kermit Schaefer was an American writer and producer for radio and television in the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known for his collections of "bloopers" - the word Schaefer coined for mistakes and gaffes of radio and TV announcers and personalities. Bloopers came into prominence in 1931, when radio announcer Harry Von Zell mispronounced the name of then-President of the United States Herbert Hoover as "Hoobert Heever" on the air, but Schaefer's is believed to be the first attempt at collecting and presenting them....
However, I didn't realize that Schaefer was controversial:
Schaefer has come under criticism from TV and radio historians who have noted his deceptive presentations in his albums. If Schaefer could not obtain an actual audio recording of the event, he would simply hire actors and recreate the event - without offering any disclaimer. This led to some misrepresentations. For example, the blooper by Harry Von Zell, described above, was not recorded. So Schaefer recreated it - but had "Von Zell"'s mispronunciation occur as the President was being introduced to an audience, which would have been highly embarrassing. Von Zell's blooper occurred at the end of a brief presentation in honor of the President's birthday, which, while still embarrassing, was not quite as mortifyingly so, as President Hoover was not present....
I'm glad they don't do things like that today.
Anyway, regarding my reference to the old guy who looks young:
After his death, Schaefer's title of "Keeper of the Bloopers" was passed to Dick Clark, who hosted and produced a long-running series of blooper specials (and a weekly program) beginning in the early 1980s and continuing until the present. By the time Clark picked up the mantle, recordings of bloopers were far more easily obtainable, and in fact were often provided willingly by the producers of films and TV shows as a way of promoting their product.
Oh boy are they provided willingly:
You know all those real-life, caught-on-video bloopers and accidents that are the staple of shows like 'Funniest Home Videos'? Guess what? According to the Hollywood Reporter A lot of them are staged. The market for bloopers has simply become too large to rely on accidental bloopers alone.
The Hollywood Reporter had the sordid details:
Robyn Roche is literally stumbling her way through her exercise video. She fumbles during step aerobics, entangles herself in jump-rope and trips all over her own words. Roche is no Jane Fonda.
No matter. Roche and her team can still turn a buck with the hapless video by licensing it to reality TV producers in search of humorous blooper footage. In this case, it's licensed three times, including to a Fox show called, appropriately enough, "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape."...
Stupid? Definitely. But reality? Hardly.
Before some clever editing, the tape was merely a collection of staged bloopers, with Roche purposely taking falls choreographed by a director named George Bartko. And, Bartko claims, some employees at Nash Entertainment, the production company behind "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape," might have known full well that they had licensed phony outtakes of an exercise video that was never to be.
"Reality producers don't care if it's fudged," Bartko says. "They're in dire need of content."...
In the "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape" exercise video, Nash Entertainment obtained the footage through Corbis, a stock footage company owned by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The company's John Brosnan says he recently learned the tape was a fake, though after it was licensed to Nash Entertainment.
But, claims Bartko, the tape's owner, "I didn't even pitch it as real."
Nash Entertainment even went the extra mile with an on-camera interview of Roche, who never suggested the falls she took were rehearsed.
"This woman, with a straight face, told us this happened," Nash Entertainment head Bruce Nash says. "What these people have done to us is reprehensible."
Roche declined to be interviewed for this report.
Perhaps she's looking for the Virgin of Governor's Island.
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