bloopers

A blooper is a short clip from a film or video production, usually a deleted scene, containing 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 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 ''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 CGI-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 ''A Bug's Life,'' (1998) ''Toy Story 2'' (1999) and ''Monsters, Inc.'' (2001), ''Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus'' (2005), '' The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature'' (2017).

Humorous mistakes made by athletes are often referred to as bloopers as well, particularly in baseball.

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 his death 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'' (1940–41) occasionally featured reconstructions of announcers' gaffes and flubs as part of the "Oddities in Radio" segment, and movie studios such as Warner Brothers had been producing so-called "gag reels" of outtakes (usually for employee-only viewing) since the 1930s. As recently as 2003, the Warner Brothers 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" in 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 out-takes 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 out-takes from film and TV. The BBC
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