A blooper, or gag reel, is a short clip from a film, television program or video production, usually a deleted scene, which includes a mistake made by a member of the cast or crew. It also refers to an error made during a live radio or TV broadcast or news report, usually in terms of misspoken words or technical errors.
The English language word comes from the early days of radio, from around 1926. Used in baseball by 1940, it meant "hit a ball in a high arc over the head of a fielder". It has been used as a noun from 1931.
The term blooper was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s in a series of record albums produced by Kermit Schafer entitled Pardon My Blooper, in which the definition of a blooper is thus given by the record series' narrator: "Unintended indiscretions before microphone and camera."
Bloopers are often the subject of television programs and may be shown during the closing credits of comedic films or TV episodes. Prominent examples of films with bloopers include The Cannonball Run, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Rush Hour. Jackie Chan and Burt Reynolds are both famous for including such reels with the closing credits of their movies.
In recent years, many animated films have also incorporated bloopers, including a mix of faked bloopers, genuine voice-actor mistakes set to animation, and technical errors. Examples can be found in Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Monsters, Inc. (2001). Humorous mistakes made by athletes are often referred to as bloopers as well, particularly in baseball. The more provocative term "choke" may be used to describe such plays instead, especially if a blooper affects the outcome of a sports competition in a major way, such as a late-game event in a close game. This is especially true if the game was an important one in the outcome of a season such as a playoff game or championship event.
Origins United States The term "blooper" was popularized in the United States by television producer Kermit Schaefer in the 1950s; the terms "boner" (meaning a boneheaded mistake) and "breakdown" had been in common usage previously. Schaefer produced a long-running series of Pardon My Blooper! record albums in the 1950s and 1960s which featured a mixture of actual recordings of errors from television and radio broadcasts and re-creations. Schaefer also transcribed many reported bloopers into a series of books that he published up until he died in 1979.
Schaefer was by no means the first to undertake serious study and collection of broadcast errata; NBC's short-lived "behind-the-scenes" series Behind the Mike (1940–42) occasionally featured reconstructions of announcers' gaffes and flubs as part of the "Oddities in Radio" segment, and movie studios such as Warner Bros. had been producing so-called "gag reels" of outtakes (usually for employee-only viewing) since the 1930s. As recently as 2003, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour included a screening of bloopers from classic films as part of the tour.
United Kingdom Jonathan Hewat (1938–2014), who had a vast personal collection of taped broadcasting gaffes, was the first person in the UK to broadcast radio bloopers, on a bank holiday show on BBC Radio Bristol at the end of the 1980s.
He subsequently produced and presented a half-hour show on that station called So You Want to Run a Radio Station?. This was nominated for a Sony Award. The transmission of humorous mistakes, previously considered private material only for the ears of industry insiders, came to the attention of BBC Radio 2. They commissioned a series of six fifteen-minute programmes called Can I Take That Again?, produced by Jonathan James Moore (then Head of BBC Light Entertainment, Radio). The success of this series led to a further five series on Radio 2 (the programme ran from 1985 to 1990), as well as a small number of programmes (called Bloopers) on BBC Radio 4.
Some of the earliest clips in Hewat's collection went back to Rudy Vallee "corpsing" (giggling uncontrollably) during a recording of "There Is a Tavern in the Town" and one of the very earliest OBs (Outside Broadcasts) of The Illumination of the Fleet.
The comment made by newsreaders after making a mistake "I'm sorry I'll read that again" was the origin of the title of the radio show which ran on the BBC during the 1960s and 1970s.
Television shows
Comedian Dick Emery showcased his own outtakes as an epilogue entitled "A Comedy of Errors" to his BBC shows in the mid-1970s. The later ITV show It'll Be Alright on the Night (originally hosted by Denis Norden) showed outtakes from film and TV. The BBC's answer to the show, Auntie's Bloomers and its spin-off, Auntie's Sporting Bloomers, ran until 2001. It was replaced by Outtake TV, which began as a series of one-off specials in 2002, hosted by Paul O'Grady, before a series was commissioned for BBC One in 2004, hosted by Anne Robinson. Special Weakest Link-themed editions were common during Robinson's tenure, which lasted until 2009. Rufus Hound took over in 2010. Outtake TV now appears as occasional one-off specials, much in the same way as It'll Be Alright on the Night.
ITV has produced two other shows, TV Nightmares and TV's Naughtiest Blunders. Both were presented by Steve Penk, before the latter show changed to show continuous clips with voice-over by Neil Morrissey. Nightmares presented TV personalities relating some of their most hair-raising moments, and Naughtiest Blunders presented more risqué mistakes. The latter has also been criticised for being used as a simple schedule filler, often with ridiculously titled editions (e.g. All New TV's Naughtiest Blunders 18).
During the 1982–83 season, TV producer Dick Clark revived the bloopers concept in America for a series of specials on NBC called TV's Censored Bloopers. This led to a weekly series which ran from 1984 through 1992 (co-hosted by Clark and Ed McMahon) and was followed by more specials that appeared on ABC irregularly until 2004, still hosted by Clark. These specials and a record album of radio bloopers produced by Clark in the mid-1980s were dedicated to the memory of Kermit Schaefer.
After Clark suffered a stroke, the blooper shows went on hiatus until 2007, when John O'Hurley hosted a special for ABC that was packaged by Dick Clark Productions.
The success of both Clark's and Norden's efforts led to imitators on virtually all American and Australian TV networks, as well as scores of home video releases; many American productions are aired to fill gaps in prime time schedules. The ABC Network aired Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders hosted by Steve Lawrence and Don Rickles in direct competition with the Clark TV series. With the coming of DVD in the 1990s, it became common for major film releases to include a "blooper reel" (also known as a "gag reel" or simply "outtakes") as bonus material on the disc.
In 1985, Steve Rotfeld began compiling stock footage of various sports-related errors and mistakes and compiled them into a program known as Bob Uecker's Wacky World of Sports. In the early 1990s, that series eventually evolved into The Lighter Side of Sports and continued in limited production through the early 2000s.
NFL Films, the official production arm of the National Football League, has produced a line of blooper reels known as the Football Follies for both television and direct-to-video consumption since 1968.
Causes
Bloopers are usually accidental and humorous. Where actors need to memorize large numbers of lines or perform a series of actions in quick succession, mistakes can be expected. Similarly, newsreaders have only a short time to deliver a large amount of information and are prone to mispronounce place names and people's names, or switch a name or word without realizing it, as in a slip-of-the-tongue or Freudian slip.
Some common examples include: Uncontrollable laughter (called, in television and acting circles, corpsing) Unanticipated incidents (e.g. a prop falling or breaking, or a child/animal failing to behave as expected) Forgotten lines Deliberate sabotage of an actor's performance by a fellow actor; a prank or practical joke (to evoke laughter from cast and crew).
The famous old chestnut of show business "Never work with children or animals" demonstrates two other causes of out-takes: Children, especially those who have no acting experience, often miss cues, deliver the wrong lines or make comments which are particularly embarrassing. (The Kids Say the Darndest Things series, conceived by Art Linkletter, deliberately sought these kinds of remarks.) Similarly, animals are very likely to do things not in the script, generally involving bodily functions.
A third type of blooper is caused by failure of inanimate objects. This can be as simple as a sound effect being mistimed or a microphone not working properly, but frequently involves doorknobs (and doors) not working or breaking, props and sets being improperly prepared, as well as props working in ways they should not work.
In recent years, mobile phones have been a new source of bloopers with them frequently going off. Many of them belong to actors, presenters, and contestants who may have forgotten to turn them off or put them in silent mode. The effect is especially pronounced when the film setting is before the modern era (e.g., ancient Greece or Rome). However, this blooper is rarely seen in recent films (most productions enforce "no cellphone" rules while on-set to reduce the risk of plot or production details being leaked) but is commonly used in fake bloopers for animations.
The reaction to bloopers is often intensified in the stressful environment of a movie or television set, with some actors expressing extreme annoyance while others enjoy the stress relief brought on by the unexpected event.
Examples
One of the earliest known bloopers is attributed to 1930s radio broadcaster Harry Von Zell, who accidentally referred to then-US President Herbert Hoover as "Hoobert Heever" during an introduction. Reportedly it was upon hearing of this mistake that Kermit Schafer was inspired to begin collecting bloopers, although the exact circumstances of the event have been debated. A similar situation occurred decades later when then-new president Gerald Ford was introduced as "Gerald Smith", the same name as an American Fascist leader from the 1930s.
On an episode of The Red Skelton Show in the 1950s, a skit involving Red's "country bumpkin" character "Clem Kadiddlehopper" had him leading a cow onto the stage. Several seconds into the skit, the cow defecated on-stage during the live broadcast. Whereupon the audience laughed uncontrollably, and Skelton resorted to the use of the ad-lib, saying "Boy, she's a great cow! Not only does she give milk, {pause} she gives Pet-Ritz Pies!" (Laughs for about ten seconds, then says some things to the cow by her ear). He followed up with, "Why didn't you think of that earlier?", "On top of that, you have a bad breath, you know that?" and finally, "Well sir, it's like they say in psychiatry. Get it out of your system." Then the network cut to a commercial.
A much-bootlegged recording of Bing Crosby has him singing to a recording of a band playing "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams", when he realizes that the master tape had not been fully rewound, and ad-libbed vocals to the truncated music. He begins, "Castles may tumble, that's fate after all/ Life's really funny that way." Realizing the shortened music, he ad-libs, "Sang the wrong melody, we'll play it back/ See what it sounds like, hey hey/ They cut out eight bars, the dirty bastards/ And I didn't know which eight bars he was gonna cut/ Why don't somebody tell me these things around here/ Holy Christ, I'm going off my nut". Part of this recording was made available to the public by Kermit Schaefer in his Blunderful World Of Bloopers record set.