Listen to Jess Harnell, the man of a thousand voices, Richard Connor, creator of music montages, Dan Slider, composer of the infamous theme song, and more!
Listen to Jess Harnell, the man of a thousand voices, Richard Connor, creator of music montages, Dan Slider, composer of the infamous theme song, and more!
AFV ep 3 TRANSCRIPT
Dan Slider: You know, it just, there's a certain type of memory. As soon as you hear it, there's a good feeling and a, and that's, that's what I brought from that. When I was a kid, the theme songs that really impacted me, you know, things like Gilligan's Island and you know, there were all vocal theme songs. Well, at the time we did AFV the trend was going away from vocal theme songs into instrumental theme songs but VIN wanted to push back. And I think, I think the network even wanted an instrumental, but he pushed back and he fought for a vocal theme.
Brittany High: Welcome back to America, This Is You. If you're joining us for the first time, hello. But you should also know that there are two great episodes that come before this one. Go back and listen to those. Don't worry, I'll wait. There's so many moving parts that go into making AFV. And in this series we've already talked about the creation, the launch, how we choose the clips, what happens if you win. I mean, the list goes on and on, but have you ever stopped to think about how our clip show sounds? I mean, besides Bob Saget's classic voice overs...
[Sound effect bed: VHS tape]
Brittany High: The whirl of the tape, the click of the camera, the hum that seems to come from nowhere. Picture that one home movie your parents or distant relative likes to trot out every Thanksgiving. Sure. Maybe it's embarrassing. Maybe it won you $100,000. Either way, it's not just the pictures that make the video. It's also the sound. I'm your host Brittany High and you're listening to America, This Is You!
Vin Di Bona: So Ernie Anderson was pretty much the most amazing announcer in television, certainly in the eighties and nineties, and Ernie's son is one of the world's most famous directors now, Paul Anderson. But Ernie was a tough one. Ernie had a pretty raw mouth and could pretty much embarrass anybody, but for some reason Ernie and I became really good friends and he wound up hosting the voice of the show for many, many, many years.
Brittany High: That was Vin Di Bona, the creator of America's Funniest Home Videos, who we met in episode one of this podcast. Ernie Anderson was the announcer from 1989 to 1995. He's probably most famous for hosting Shock Theater under the alter ego Ghoulardi.
[Television clip of Ghoulardi Ernie Anderson: Watch it for the boom boom 'til the day you won't believe what this is going to do!]
Brittany High: Or for being the voice of the love boat.
[Television promo clip Ernie Anderson: Saturday at eight, seven central and modern. It's a special two hour star back love boat.]
Brittany High: And fathering award winning director Paul Thomas Anderson.
[ Television clip Paul Anderson: You know, I had a feeling since I was a young kid that I really wanted to make films.]
Brittany High: But when Ernie retired, it was time to find a new voice for the show.
Jess Harnell: My whole life is a cartoon. I am a cartoon!
Brittany High: That's Jess Harnell, AFV's rockstar announcer since 1998.
Jess Harnell: See, that's the crazy thing, you know, is it sometime life leads you down paths that you, you may or may not expect to go down. And I, I always thought from the time that I was a little kid that I was going to be literally a rock star and I started doing guest shots on cartoon shows. And I ended up getting this, my first big role on a series, talk about a way to start, was show called Animaniacs.
Jess Harnell: And I played the character Wakko Warner who's very, very popular. People like him because he doesn't wear pants, and he's funny, not that those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Brittany High: Cartoons are part of AFV's DNA. Don't believe me? Go back to episode one and hear where Bob Saget drew all of his voiceover ideas from...
[CLIP FROM THE LOONEY TUNES PLAYS.]
Brittany High: But there's another part of Jess's career that most people wouldn't be aware of...
Jess Harnell: I do all kinds of stuff, and when actors sometimes can't complete their dialogue for movies, I go in and pick those things up cause I do a lot of impressions. So sometimes when you hear Christopher Walken, it's not really him. It's me. It's weird. So I do, I just, I just changed my voice into a million different things. And I have been very fortunate because I'm really not qualified to do anything but this.
Brittany High: Wow, what a crazy, fun gig. Jess also has an amazing singing voice, but more on that later. So how does being a voice actor get you the gig of AFV announcer? I'll let Jess tell the tale.
Jess Harnell: And what happened was there's a very talented fellow named Dan Slider and he wrote the theme song for AFV. And he had me come in to sing for him, not for AFV but for something else. And I, I was singing for him and he said, you know, I wrote the AFV theme song and I started singing it to him cause it's one of those earworms you guys who watch the show, you know, you can't forget that theme song. And I said, I love that song, man. I love that song. I really did. I was legitimate. I'm very, I'm a very honest person. And I, I really did think it was cool. And he said, you know, we're actually looking for a new announcer. And he said, I know you do a lot of this voiceover stuff in addition to singing. And I said, cool man.
Jess Harnell: And he said, yeah, let me send you some sides again, that's the script. So I auditioned for it and I got the call to come in and try a session. I don't know that they were completely sold on me, probably cause they looked at me and thought I was in Whitesnake and they said, well, we're going to give him a try. And I walked in and they said, okay, now this is the, one of the main producers on the show. This is a Michele Nasraway. And on that day a friendship was formed that has lasted, I think I've been doing this about 20 years. Is that right? And Michele and I had been great friends since the whole thing began. It was difficult to believe that she was the all-powerful TV mogul that she is because she's such a nice person. And when I left, and that's probably why so many good things happened, 'cause basically I forget about 'em as soon as I do them. And then my agent calls and goes, oh you got that? And I said, what was that? And they said, Oh, it's this. But when I left AFV, I called my agent, they said, how'd it go? And 20 years later, I'm sitting here in a chair talking to you. And so again, things are, you know, amazing things happen and this has certainly been one of them in my life for sure.
Brittany High: Jess mentioned Dan Slider, a man who was born into a world of music. Let's hear a little from him.
Dan Slider: My father was a music director, band director, you know. All through high school I was studying music, went to college in Boston and everything was music related.
Brittany High: Dan wanted to do original music for television and movies, but he found it incredibly hard to break into the industry.
Dan Slider: When I got out to LA, you know, there was like episodic television to be done, but those were pretty much locked up gigs at that point. So for new things, there was the opportunity to do source music, which is like where, you know, the, the actual score composer wouldn't have time to do.
Brittany High: Dan had a gig, he was making a living, but he hadn't quite made it to the position he'd stay at for 30 years. First he had to meet and work with Vin.
Dan Slider: And we worked on our first show together. It was the Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. I don't know if you've seen the clip, but that's, it's, it's a viral clip that came back as 'cause it's so eighties.
[CLIP OF THE CRYSTAL LIGHT NATIONAL AEROBIC CHAMPIONSHIP.]
Dan Slider: It's one of these pieces of music that says 80s all over it, you know, but that's how I met Vin. Yeah. After we did the aerobic championship, VIN established his own company and he, we did a, I did a sort of a kid show called Wet, Wild, and Woolly, I think it was called, followed by a show called Animal Crack-ups. So we did Animal Crack-ups and I worked on the theme with Allen. He wrote it and I arranged it and produced it. And so I got to know Vin more and more during that time. And when the idea came up to do AFV, you know, I was one of his first calls, which was fantastic. You know, came at a great time. One of the first meetings that we had, you know, Vin was explaining this show to me. You know, essentially what, what my mind was hearing was we're going to show people, people's home movies. All right. And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, you know, I run away when my aunt pulls out the home movies, you know, I'm sure America's gonna run away. You know, I couldn't see it, but, but he obviously did and he knew what he had, but I still didn't think it would be a hit. I thought it was going to be a one off, you know, a great special. But boy was I wrong.
Brittany High: Yeah, you were super wrong, Dan. But you did create the greatest theme song of all time for America's Funniest Videos, so...
Dan Slider: Speaking of the theme song, it came about in kind of unusual way. I created a, uhh, an instrumental theme, which, which was the theme that we, we know in terms of how it sounds and everything. And I wrote sort of a temp lyric for it, which was...the intent of it was correct, you know, to what it is today, but it was not what it is today. And the intent may have been there, but I was not a great lyricist. It was one of those things I had created, created the music and the way the music came down, I had a meeting with Vin and he suggested some artists to me that he liked. One of them that really stuck with me was Ricky Nelson, of all things, I don't know if you know. He did a song called Garden Party and another one called Hello, Mary Lou. Now we're talking early sixties.
[Hello, Mary Lou by Ricky Nelson plays.]
Dan Slider: Hello, Mary Lou in particular, there was something very Americana about it, very sing, songy and very memorable. And before I knew it, another version of the song came back into Vin's office that came from Joe Kaluchi. She had gotten a hold of the, my demo essentially and written a lyric with a partner of hers, Stu Harris. So the theme song came back to Vin with this, with this complete lyric, which was, the intent was the same as what I had put, but it was so refined and so good.
Brittany High: If I'm being honest, which I am, on my first day of work at AFV, I belted the theme song the whole drive. It's about a 45 minute commute, so I was pretty much horse by the time I got there.
[AFV THEME SONG plays.]
Dan Slider: Originally the pilot aired with the instrumental version as a theme and then in the course of the show there was a montage where that song played.
Richard Connor: Richard Conner. I'm a co-executive producer on the show. I do the musical montages. Sometimes music tells you what it wants, right? Yeah. So every year I have a bunch of concepts I want to do, whether it be amusement parks or playgrounds or families. And those all need music. So half of the montages I do, I do two montages per show, and half of those, I make classical music out of it and classical music's beautiful to cut to so there's no problem there. It's just a matter of finding the right tone and tenor and tempo and, but finding songs for like a dog montage, you know, it's helpful when you have a song that has the word dog in it. So, a million years ago, Who Let The Dogs Out was a hit. Obviously I use that. Uhh, last year I used a song called Like My Dog, which nobody had ever heard of and it was, it, it was perfect.
Richard Connor: It went so well with the, with the montage, it's just a matter of poking around, looking for keywords. So sometimes they get lucky that way, but the rest of the time I just have to find a song that has a good tempo, catchy chorus, some sort of hook and has some individual lyrics that I can make, make sense with clips. So if it says, you know, she was turning her head or she made a big jump or something, I can find a clip that just fulfills that little lyric. And then the audience won't necessarily notice that the next three clips have nothing to do with the lyric. So sometimes the song throws an obvious idea at you.
Brittany High: But it's not just these amazing hits from years ago. Rich has his eyes, or I guess ears in this case, on the current music charts.
Richard Connor: So we have a great song, a big hit right now called Old Town Road by Lil NAS X and Billy Ray Cyrus.
[OLD TOWN ROAD by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus plays.]
Richard Connor: That's the guy singing you about getting on his horse and going to the old town road. I mean that walked right into my life that that concept. We've got a million horse clips, we've got a million people who want to be cowboys. So I just designed a montage around that song, which was basically people who would never make it to the old town road cause they're not good enough cowboys to get there. So it was just, I turned the song upside down and it was perfect!
Brittany High: As an EP, Rich has a lot of responsibilities around the office, but these montages are his passion. You can really tell how much he puts into his work by his ability to tell a story.
Richard Connor: In season 11, I did Stevie Wonder's Signed, Sealed, and Delivered. And the concept was people were jumping out of boxes. It's mostly military, like people coming home and they're jumping out of boxes to surprise their loved one. Now I could've just done, you know, box opens, box opens, box opens box open. But I said, no, you know, I could probably tell a story with these same clips. So the first third of the montage was the people hiding, getting ready to startle the person. The second third of the montage was the people actually getting startled. And the third part, and this was the part that really, I think everybody here and probably watching liked, the third part was the emotional reunion once the startle was over. So when the song, when Stevie Wonder's song went into its refrain of signed, sealed, and delivered, I went into a refrain of the same people we'd already seen twice having that emotional moment before we left. And so sometimes yo can tell a story. So it's not always just about hits and redundancy, it's you just try and tell a story with a song.
Brittany High: For me, this speaks to the soul of AFV. Sure, the show is filled with clips of boneheads and groin hits, but we've got heart and spades. You have to hear this story from Jess.
Jess Harnell: You know, I've always said that the mark of a great leader is how much they love their team and how, with the respect that they treat their team with whether this is in relationships or in business or, or an AFV and Vin Di Bona is such a good guy. He just honestly is. He, he takes really good care of his people. He goes out of his way every, I remember the first time I came in at Christmas time and they said, Oh, here's your Christmas gift. And I said, Christmas gift? And they said, yeah. And they've given me a Christmas gift every year since. He treats his staff, they have parties, he just does stuff that most bosses don't do, cause they don't have to. But he chooses to, you know, and I just think that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. But one of those parties and one of those Christmas parties, you know, my background is primarily as a singer.
Jess Harnell: And I think that a lot of the time when people, you know, say, Oh well, you know, I'm a singer, I also sing. And you hear them sing without being at all, you know, I'm not trying to be derogatory, but they can carry a tune. Well, my whole background is singing. You know, I've been singing for longer that I've been doing voiceover. And they had this party and they had this little band there. The bandleader was a guy that I had sang with in the studio for something, some session or something. And he said, Hey, you want to sing and you want to get up? And I said, yeah, sure. And he said, he said, well, you know, we can't do any, you know, Journey songs or whatever. And I said, said, well, we can play standards. And I said, do you know Unchained Melody, which is that beautiful song from Ghost that goes, Oh my love not, you know, I said, I'll sing that, you know, and it's not an easy song to sing if you sing it the way it's supposed to be.
Jess Harnell: So, and I sang it and Tom Bergeron, God bless him, you know, the, the host before Alfonso was there and he, he was, he was having food. And as I was singing, people sort of quieted down because they're like, well, who's that singing? And I don't think they expected it to be the announcer of the show. And Tom put his stuff out and just watched me sing, and came over after I was done, and Michele and everybody else had heard me sing before and they were always very kind about it, but, but Tom's like, I had no idea that you sang like that. He was just, he goes, I am blown away. And I was like, that. It just, again, it's something he didn't have to do, you know? But we were always very friendly and, and you know, and, and that's just, that's another fond memory and a series of fond memories, you know, of this show and how good they've always been to me.
Brittany High: You're telling me the Tom Bergeron stopped everything to listen to your song? That's really something. But you know, what else is something?
Jess Harnell: And you sound like a Disney princess. How 'bout that. You got it on record! It's official.
Brittany High: Boo-Yah. So after nearly a decade on the air, Bob was ready to leave the show.
Vin Di Bona: Yeah. Bob left the show and we were fortunate to find Daisy Fuentes and John Fugelsang
Brittany High: What was to become of AFV?
Dan Slider: Now when, when things shifted at the end of Bob Saget's run, and we had John Fugelsang and Daisy Fuentes in there, they went for a more modern approach. The theme all of a sudden was updated.
Brittany High: Who would go on to fill the shoes of everyone's favorite TV Dad?
Daisy Fuentes: I thought it was great. I thought it was a really easy gig. And fun, like I genuinely enjoyed it.
Brittany High: Tune in next time when I talk to John Fugelsang, Daisy Fuentes and yes, Tom Bergeron. They, actually let me talk to him.
Brittany High: See ya next time!
Brittany High: America. This is you is brought to you by AFV in partnership with Sirius XM. This episode is produced by my best pal ever and producer Rob Schulte and me. It was mastered by all around. Good guy, Jim Bilodeau. Andrew Gruss provided his audio engineering abilities, so thank you. Additional help was provided by Sharon Arnett, Michael Fische and Kelsey Albright. Thank you to AFV's OG editor, Manny Maura, TV's best composer Dan slider, the man of a thousand voices, Jess Harnelle, and my favorite music montage, man, Richard Conner. It was a blast talking to each of you PS, special things to Howard and Karen Schwartz for allowing us to use the crystal light national aerobic championship audio. Thank you to Michele for making this podcast possible by helping me in all of the ways, even when she's, you know, busy running the actual show.