TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes

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Ed McMahon, center, and Dick Clark, right, host a 1980s episode of Bloopers.

TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes was a television series and a group of television specials aired in the United States by NBC and, later, ABC from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

The series was predated by two separate series of specials, one devoted to television and film bloopers -- humorous errors made during the production of film and television programs, or on live news broadcasts -- and the other a series of specials featuring classic television commercials. The TV's Censored Bloopers specials were hosted by longtime TV producer Dick Clark starting in 1982 (and were dedicated to 1950s TV producer Kermit Schaefer, who had pioneered the concept of preserving bloopers) and the Television's Greatest Commercials specials, which also started in 1982, were hosted by Ed McMahon of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Both sets of specials garnered high ratings, and following a combination special (TV's Greatest Censored Commercial Bloopers), in the fall of 1984 it was decided to combine the two programs into one series, hosted by Clark and McMahon.

Besides dividing the show between bloopers and classic TV advertisements of yesteryear, the show also featured at least two practical joke segments, featuring celebrities caught in Candid Camera-like situations (the later series Punk'd used this same idea).

Other regular features included:

Man-in-the-street interviews (sometimes supplemented by child-in-the-street interviews), conducted by David Letterman and, later, Robert Klein
Video segments featuring songs played behind real-life scenes that gave an ironic twist to the lyrics.
Len Cella's "Silly Cinemas", a series of absurd short films
Tom Sharp's "Book of Hollywood", a tour of unusual sights of the city
Wil Shriner's Video Vault, where various humorous video clips were screened
Stand-up comedy performances, including appearances by Jerry Seinfeld and Jenny Jones
Throughout its entire run on both NBC and ABC, the series featured animated inserts by cartoonist Sergio Aragones.

As the original two-year weekly run of the series progressed, adjustments were made to the format and eventually the commercials were phased out along with other segments, leaving only the bloopers and practical jokes behind. In addition to that, it was renamed Super Bloopers & New Practical Jokes.

After the series ended as a weekly offering, Clark (who produced the show) continued to host a subsequent series of specials with titles including TV's Censored Bloopers (with a short-lived weekly version in 1998), and just plain Bloopers as the practical joke element was ultimately dropped; these specials were aired on-and-of by NBC until as late as 1998, often appearing as "filler" for cancelled series and as a low-cost summer replacement series, where it often easily outdrew its competition of mainly reruns. In later years, most bloopers shown tended to come from NBC-produced programs only.

In 1998, Clark moved his Bloopers specials to ABC, where new specials were made periodically up until 2004 when Clark suffered a stroke and was unable to continue. (Despite this, ABC continued to air reruns of the specials as late as 2006, and they also frequently appear on the TBS Superstation.) Like the later NBC specials, the ABC specials mostly focused on bloopers taken from productions made by ABC and its parent company, Walt Disney Studios.

During the show's original two-year run on NBC, it sparked a number of imitators on other networks, most notably the ABC series Foul-ups, Bleeps & Blunders; the ABC series never matched the NBC version in the ratings, although it did score a coup by airing the first American network transmission of bloopers from Star Trek (which, ironically, was an NBC production).