Learn how America’s Funniest Home Videos came to be. Hear from creator Vin Di Bona, host Bob Saget, and more folks from behind the scenes.
Learn how America’s Funniest Home Videos came to be. Hear from creator Vin Di Bona, host Bob Saget, and more folks from behind the scenes.
AFV ep 1 TRANSCRIPT
Vin Di Bona: He said, but I got to tell you, when we brought you in that next day after the special aired and we asked you to do 11 shows and you walked out of the room, and Ted Harbert turned to me and said, there's no friggin’ way he's going to be able to deliver 11 shows. I said, you know, Bob, it's really funny. I walked out of that room with my agent and turned to him and said, how the hell am I going to deliver 11 shows? And we both had a huge laugh and the fact of the matter was stuff started pouring in...
Brittany High: Welcome to America, This is you! It's a podcast about all things America's Funniest Home Videos, also known as AFV. Can you believe the clip show has been around for 30 years? From the mind of Vin Di Bona hosted by greats like Bob Saget, Tom Bergeron, and Alfonso Ribeiro, and totally made up of videos from you. Have you ever wondered who watches all those videos? Who picks the winners? Where did AFV even come from anyway? How does the show continue to thrive in the digital age? We'll talk about all of that and more in this five-part podcast series we've created with Sirius XM. And who the heck am I? Well, I'm Brittany High. I work at AFV and I am a long time, big time fan like every other kid in the 90s I watched America's funniest home videos, but unlike the other kids, I never stopped watching. And now I work here and they let me make this podcast. So here I am with the Vin Di Bona.
Vin Di Bona: I'm a Vin Di Bona executive producer of America's funniest home videos
Brittany High: Calling Vin a big deal is putting it lightly. This is the head of a company that was built over the course of 40 years. He seen struggle, success and everything in between. The thing is he didn't always want to make television. When he was 15 years old. He had different ambitions.
[Music bed “Alone at the Dance” by Vin Di Bona aka Johnny Lindy]
Vin Di Bona: I was a balladeer, a crooner and I was doing ballads and I recorded my first record in Nashville at the Owen Bradley studios, which was the place to record in Nashville, Connie Francis, the Jordanaires the Aniticur Singers, Floyd Kramer, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison. All recorded in that studio and to this day I can hear my studio sound and their studio sound and it was exactly the same. I went around town in all the new England towns and then sorta toured Baltimore and Pittsburgh and New York and did some TV, but then the Beatles broke. It was hard being a ballad singer when the Beatles broke, but it, but what happened was I would go to television stations to promote the record and I got really interested in television.
Brittany High: Vin went to Emerson where he studied radio production, then moved on to graduate school at UCLA. It was there that his interest in film and television really took off. He was so excited by the idea of producing television. He would practice directing cues in the bathroom mirror
Vin Di Bona: And I practice fade up from black cue sound cue music cue announcer. Eventually after I did my first one, kind of the television bug bit me and that was it, and I started making a name for myself doing lots of documentary shows. I also worked for a friend of mine, Jeff Goldstein, who is the director of wheel of fortune and I used to be the stage manager, that queued the board for the letters to change. So I was doing a lot of different stuff at the same time. I was working for channel two doing a specials and documentaries for them. I was working six, seven days a week. And then my agent, Richard Brustein found out that there was a new show that paramount was doing called Entertainment Tonight. And he asked me to interview for the show and I did.
Brittany High: But Vin’s time with entertainment tonight was short lived.
Vin Di Bona: I had a, an interesting issue with the executive producer and I was fired and it was the first time I've ever been fired in my life.
Brittany High: Many of us have been fired and most of us take it pretty hard. But Vin wasn't exactly phased. He was already moving on to his next project.
Vin Di Bona: My first wife, Gina, was watching CBS news and she saw at the end of the newscast this crazy little creature that was from a Japanese game show, actually, It was from Australia, it was the Australian frilled lizard, the Australian frilled lizard, this lizard that runs on its hind legs. It's really goofy. And when it sees someone who might prey on it, it has this sort of Queen Anne collar that pops out and it sort of startles, you know, it's, it's predator. And for some reason the Japanese population had fallen in love with this critter and they were importing and these little suckers were running all over Tokyo. And that's what the story was about. And so I looked at and said, this would make a great show. It basically was a, a game show about animals that this critter had come from. I was able to get a tape of the show and I took it around, you know, it was basically Wild Kingdom meets Hollywood Squares. They would do a on an animal and it usually had a wow factor or something that you didn't know. And then a panel of four people would try and guess what it was going to do. What it usually does, what happens when it sees food, and that's primarily what the show is about. But in a comical fashion because the Japanese really had fun with these animals. So I pitched the show 136 times.
Brittany High: Oh really? You heard correctly… 136 times, and this wasn't even AFV yet.
Vin Di Bona: I went back to some people three or four times and they'd say, you know, I really liked that Japanese show, but it's Japanese. I said, well, you don't understand. So I brought it to my first boss from Westinghouse and he bought it sight unseen, and I did two pilots and they both aired and then we wound up doing three years of that show.
Brittany High: The show was called Animal Crack-Ups.
[Television clip: Alan Thicke: Hello! Thank you very much and welcome to Animal Crack-Ups, where animals hop and they skip and they jump and they do a lot of things that kids aren’t allowed to do on the sofa!]
Vin Di Bona: And I became fast friends, of course, with Tokyo broadcasting, being the first American producer to bring a Japanese show to America and turn it into a hit. And at the end of three years, all the footage had run out. Everything they'd shot was, was over. So there was no place else to go except that my friends from Tokyo broadcasting brought me this video show that was really kind of it was a variety show. They would do a comedy sketch, it would be a dance number, there'd be a music number, there'd be a talk segment. And then they show three home videos. Nobody had ever seen home videos before. The camcorder had just come out. And at the end of the show they would say, well, of those three videos, what was your favorite? And the celebrities would say, I liked the one with the little boy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they said, what do you think to me? I said, well, variety's pretty much dead in America. I think we should run all home videos. I think we should run a contest. And that's it. And so I put a tape together of some of the clips from their show. And remember I sold my first show on 136 pitches. I brought this tape to ABC. Hank Cohen was the junior executive at the time in the entertainment division and the tape was 12 minutes long. Four minutes in, he turned to me and said, we're going to buy this show, and that was it.
Brittany High: So Vin had a green light on the pilot, but now he needed videos to put in the pilot and to get those videos, he had to put the word out and to put the word out, he needed money.
Vin Di Bona: So I want $100,000 on top of the budget to go across the country and promote this show. I want to buy ads in TV Guide, which was a big magazine at the time. I got a five minute segment on Good Morning America and I went around to seven or eight TV stations around the country showing this Japanese tape of these, you know, these fails and fun stuff. I'll never forget it. The second day I got back from my New York trip to GMA, we got 31 tapes through the course of a month and a half. We amassed about 1800 tapes to do a one hour show, which was recorded in October.
Brittany High: The pilot was in the works, tapes were pouring in, what could go wrong?
Vin Di Bona: And it aired Thanksgiving weekend, 1989 and got the worst review I've ever gotten on any show in my life. Some guy from the LA times said it was trash TV and it wasn't funny and these were civilians and who cares? And then the Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend, the show aired and there were blizzards on the East coast torrential rain on the West coast and everybody was watching TV. They tuned in and people started calling each other in the first 50 gotta of watch.. look! ABC, blah, blah. And it was a huge hit, was the highest rated show in 12 years that they'd had on a Sunday night.
Brittany High: Vin's formula clearly worked, but what was that formula exactly? Well, there were the videos, but there was also a host.
Vin Di Bona: I had always loved John Ritter and I went after John Ritter to host the show and at that point in John's career, he was really more interested in being an actor than a host. And I understood that. And so we, we had this very collegial discussion and we remained friends for a long time, but we had to move on. And Steve Paskay, who was another executive producer on the show, was being helped me create the show, saw Bob Saget on the tonight show.
Steve Paskay: Because we were really trying to show America who they were in their funniest moments. And we realized while there's something here, but we can't do it the same way that the Japanese are doing it. We wanted something more and different than that.
Vin Di Bona: So we went to ABC, he liked Bob a lot. So we went to ABC and said, we want to use this guy Bob Saget from Full House. Some of the people at ABC didn't even know Bob Saget from Full House.
Brittany High: That was all about to change.
Brittany High: All right, well let's start with you introducing yourself and how long you've been with the show.
Bob Saget: You can introduce me. I can't say my name.
Brittany High: Absolutely.
Bob Saget: It's like, it's like slating yourself when you're beginning actor.
Brittany High: This is Bob Saget, the original host of AFV. He was with the show for eight whole years.
[Television clip Bob Saget: You're a wonderful audience, you really are. I'm not just kissing up. I'm really not. I swear I'm, I'm slobbering all over you is what I'm doing. Cause I need you to like me real bad cause I have no act and I have no life and I have no future. I'm serious. My mom was gumby to be my dad...]
Brittany High: Bob Saget the first host, every 90s kids TV dad. Bob started his career as a standup comedian, so he was quick on his feet.
Vin Di Bona: Interestingly, working with a standup comedian is very different than working with a talent. A host, a stand up really lives on their last line where a host will read pretty much anything that he or she likes and feels comfortable with and delivers it. But with a standup, it's like their life's on the line at the end of each joke. And sometimes Bob and I would, we'd come to disagreements on what was funny but all in a sense of making a great show. So Bob and I had a great deal of respect for each other.
Bob Saget: I had been on this show Full House on ABC. And unbeknownst to me Vin Di Bona had put an ad in People magazine and it was an ad asking people to send in their VHS tapes or any tapes they had of, you know, kids, weddings, people falling down whatever a producer, Steve Paskay had seen me on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson showing some home videos and narrating them and they said, this is our guy. And then they asked me if I wanted to host it and I watched the 20 minute tape and I think I laughed. I mean from start to finish, I couldn't believe it cause it was the best of the best of pretty much ever. You know, it was a resin of the finest crotch hits and little kids falling down and people fainting at weddings. And I agreed to host it.
Vin Di Bona: During the Saget years. Saget was one of the key writers.
Bob Saget: I wrote it with Todd Thick and Robert Arnott and we wrote a couple of hundred episodes. I think that's how that went. And I decided to do the voiceovers.
Vin Di Bona: And then we do voiceover sessions with Bob, which were interminable.
Bob Saget: I was trying to copy a guy named Mel Blanc, who was a genius, who was Bugs Bunny and Sylvester and Tweety bird and Pepe Le Pew. And unbelievable the things this man did. So my voices were like, "Look out", you know, it was just the bad version.
[AFV Clip Bob Saget: The flower arrangements are fabulous and I'm so glad I dieted to fit into this skirt]
Bob Saget: Guys on top of a diving board.
Bob Saget: Oh look at me, I'm so handsome. And then he gets it in the crotch—GLAVIN’—Jerry Lewis, you know, you just
[AFV Clip Bob Saget: Why am I the only guy singing at this wedding, well at least I get free food. You know, I don't feel so good. It shouldn't have had that clam dip!]
Bob Saget: It was whatever seemed appropriate to the clip. And I only had a certain amount of, my suitcase wasn't that full of voices, but they became characters on the show. And it took seven hours to record voiceovers back in the day before we had to find what the show was. So the first year was just me just trying to figure out what voiceovers worked. And then it became like, Oh, let's see how fast we can get this session done.
[AFV Clip Bob Saget: Now I've got the long line and you got the short line and I'm going to let go of it and you're going to catch it with your teeth!]
Vin Di Bona: In a five second voiceover. He would get 15 words in. I don't know how the hell he did it, but he did. And, and basically had about six voices he had this voice. He had that voice, he had ahhh voice, and he had the voice of a cat, the voice of a dog. That was it.
Bob Saget: And I was always very self critical, very hard on myself and wanting to be funnier and felt like, but you, it's a clip show, Bob, just give it up. And then I, but I never gave up trying to be funny. But then I look at people, you know, years later that I really like, like Daniel Tosh and Joel McHale was doing Talk Soup and Rob Dyrdek and all these people that are really good at the modernized, smarter, hipper version of something. You know, it's nice to get complimented cause I got bashed a lot for my jokes that was like, Oh there's, it's puns and it's like puns or jokes, bro. You know, Groucho Marx, I was a fan, you know, it was a lot of puns. And maybe cause I was so young and doing them, but now they would call them dad jokes. But now people just like me on it. But it's like, it takes a lot of years and it had to have liked me cause it was number one. You know, when it became number one, I was like, wow, this is, Vin called me and said we're number one. And I said, is that Pee? And he went, no, I mean we're number one. And now you can't, he still can't show that you had a blur that
[AFV Clip Ernie Anderson: It's Sunday. There's a whole new night of laughs on ABC. First, Bob Saget host the all new thoroughly refreshing, America's Funniest Home Videos.]
Bob Saget: But, we hit and this show's still hits because it's just, it's become an establishment. I mean it's, it's a staple of television now. It's been 30 years. That's crazy. That's crazy.
Brittany High: Is it crazy or is it that watching people fall down or get hit in the head with a pinata stick never goes out of style. I'm of course on the side of the show being crazy, crazy fun, but it doesn't come without its challenges.
Bob Saget: Straighten up. Stop doing dumb jokes. But it's hard to host a clip show at seven o'clock at night and not go edgy or not go weird. If it got too weird, they didn't want that because that doesn't reach everybody. So you kind of have to be homogeneous in a way. You have to really try to feed the right beast that entertains everyone.
Brittany High: I asked Bob about one of his most memorable experiences on set
Bob Saget: One day. I was very frustrated and I had a script and they given me a lot of notes and said I couldn't say this and I couldn't say this and I couldn't say this and it was just one day I was just not fun. And I came in and Vin was there and I was half joking, half serious and I was like imagine this is about America's Funniest Home Videos, the most innocuous sweet show. But there was, there was some clips I didn't approve of that I didn't like cause I didn't want to see people really hurt. But I came into work one day I, the second season or something I said, I said I'm so stupid. I was 31 32 I said it's going to be a bloodbath today. And I was like, Oh my God, what are you talking about? You're hosting a video show you cocky 32 year old overpaid jerk. But that's what happens if ya, if you have success and you're 30 years old and it's like, you know, the odds of you being a totally together person and not have it go to your head are pretty slim. It's unfortunate. And, but I then tried to surround myself with smarter people and then to spend more time with my kids and that kind of helped me out. And then by, by the fourth season we were just, we were cooking. We had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun doing it. Just when you're in a room and you're collaborating, you're coming up with a different funny way to talk about something. It's pretty, it's pretty significant. So
Brittany High: The crew at AFV weren't just cooking. They were growing soon they had the highest rated Sunday night show in history!
Vin Di Bona: So when the series started in 1990 because the pilot aired in 1989 we did 11 shows and it was like, we beat 60 minutes. Holy crap, we beat 60 minutes. I remember Dan rather, it was in, in Newport, Rhode Island. And my mom was there and my mom said, my son is the producer of America's Funniest Home Videos. And one of the guys, it wasn't Rather said, Oh really? Cause we had just beaten them that week. But it was pretty amazing. And for the season finale, the a hundred thousand dollar winner was a baseball player who in the outfield jumped for a fly ball, flipped over a low chain link fence and his red
[AFV Clip: crowd laughing and cheering for baseball player]
Vin Di Bona: Underwear popped off. That was the finalist winner. And that show was a 40 share, 40 million people watch that show...
Brittany High: 40 million people...for reference. That's a lot of people.
Bob Saget: And then that was off to the races. It was family time. And it still is. I mean it's it's appointment television. I wish I didn't know. I mean people DVR it, they watch it live, which is really unusual these days. But, but it was really cool to meet people that came out and there was a contest and one guy, I said, what are you going to do with the money? And he said, we're going to buy our first house. And that just touched me. That was just like so sweet and that's one of the things I loved about the show also is that it would just show really loving moments. It wasn't just fall down funny. And that the heart of the show I think is what made people feel like, Oh, I can watch this with my kid until you would see a wedding clip and somebody would pass out, you know, the groom or I mean, how many crotch hits can you watch? It's, it's endless.
Brittany High: Don't threaten me with the good time.
Steve Paskay: I think America was more sensitive in 1989 than they certainly are now, but at that time we felt we sort of had to cushion the laugh and give people permission to laugh. We did something that frankly I think was very smart. We went out and we bought the sound effect comedy cartoon library of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. We knew that these clips were in many ways our human cartoon. And that we needed to add funny sound effects that subconsciously you remember as being an anvil hit to the head or a Fred Flintstone’s, you know, bongo feet
[Sound Effect of Fred Flinstone’s Feet]
Steve Paskay: Something that allowed you as the audience to view these clips as maybe a human cartoon and you have permission to laugh with and at them.
Bob Saget: America's funniest. I always want to say home videos cause that was me. But the, this show America's Funniest Videos is the best of it really is. So you're, you're going to watch that show with your family. You know you're going to get laughs and the one, if you're not having for awhile, you're going to end up laughing cause it just, it just catches up on you.
Steve Paskay: I've worked with Vin for at least 40 years going back to entertainment tonight, he and I only really had one big fight in our lives and that was just before the taping of the show. Vin did not think that the show was ready to be taped. He did not find the clips to be funny enough. And I said, you've seen them too much. You've seen them too often. You will see when we tape the show that they are still funny and we had a big fight about it. I said, look, you hired me and you trust me and I gotta tell you we're ready. And we went during the dress rehearsal of the show, the camera people were laughing so hard at the dress rehearsal that they were screwing up the shots!
[Music bed: The Funny Things You do/Original AFV Theme]
Brittany High: I've got a lot more in store for you in the next couple of weeks. We've got Michele Nasraway.
Michele Nasraway: I'm the ambassador, if you will, to the network. I'm sort of the face of the show.
Vin Di Bona: Michele started, I think it was Michele's second job. She started as a PA as a screener and she moved up.
Bob Saget: And Michele Nasraway is an executive producer now for the show and she started out as an assistant 30 years ago. And so it's really interesting to watch that and that's Vin finding the best in people and trying to get the best out of 'em.
Brittany High: Editors!
Manny: And all of a sudden there's this horse fart that lasts 33 seconds!
Brittany High: And of course some of your favorite hosts.
Daisy Fuentes: I thought it was a really easy gig. Fun, like I genuinely enjoyed it.
John Fugelsang: You taught me how to have fun with it.
Tom Bergeron: I said to Vin, I'd love to do it. It would have to be different.
Alfonso Ribiero: You know, will the show be able to continue? Will the fans still enjoy the show?
Brittany High: If you liked this episode, subscribe and leave a rating and review. Share it with all of your friends, share it with your enemies. We've got four more episodes coming your way, so stay tuned. America, this is you! Is brought to you by AFV in partnership with Sirius XM. This episode is produced by producer Rob Schulte and me, mastered by the master master Jim Bilodeau. And Andrew Gruss is our quote unquote sound guy. We couldn't have made it without the help of Melissa Blanca, Michael Fische, Sarah Esocoff, Sharon Arnett, Kelsey Albright, and So Choi. Thank you to the man who signs my paychecks. Vin Di Bona, to my TV dad, Bob Saget, and to the bunny slippers wearin' and Steve Paskay for sitting down with me and answering all of my questions.