I get asked to record voicemail messages or make prank calls. When people find out, they get pretty excited. I have a niece and nephew who love Bop It! and get a real kick out of the fact that their uncle does the voice.
It’s just fun to say: “I remember my first time playing Bop It!” and be a little sarcastic. I particularly enjoy doing the razzes: that’s when you mess up and the toy pokes fun at you. You have to find different energy levels because the toy is going to be saying these phrases over and over.
I prepared well for the recording session, which took about an hour and a half. Only when I got the job did I realise the magnitude of the project. I particularly enjoy it when you mess up and the toy gets sarcastic There’s nothing put-on with the Bop It! voice: it’s just me, or maybe me on 10 energy drinks. And they said: “Just say it really excited.” So that’s what I did. I didn’t know what Bop It! was when I got the audition, so I asked how they wanted me to approach it. “I have a love/hate relationship with it.” A year or so later, a Simpsons episode did a spoof called Bonk It, which was pretty cool.īuddy Rubino, voice of Bop It! since 2008 Years later I met Simpsons creator Matt Groening and told him about it. We obviously couldn’t get clearance for that so in the final product it became a scream like you’d just hammered your finger. I used Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” line for when the player messed up. When I did the original pitch, I sped up my voice and put in silly sound effects. It launched two years later, cost $5 more and outsold the original by 50%. The company asked: “What else can we do?” They suggested making it smaller but I wanted to make it bigger, so I showed them ideas for Bop It! Extreme. Then, in the second year, it did even better. “There’s something here.”īop It! launched in 1997 and was a reasonable success, but I was told it would probably die out in three years. I took it to Milton Bradley, before they were bought over by Hasbro, and pitched it to Bill Dohrmann, an industry legend, the guy who discovered Twister and the Nerf ball. It was fun to do and funny to watch people do it. Then I made a recording of myself saying “bop it, twist it, pull it” – all things you could do to the prototype.
0 kommentar(er)
