I believe it was the third time in my life that I knew I had been ripped off.

I was in a store named GameCo at the now deceased Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe, Kansas. I found a DVD entitled “The Sports Blooper Encyclopedia” priced at five dollars. I spent allowance money earned from mowing my parents’ lawn to secure it, take it home, and play it on the old silver Sony DVD player atop our basement TV. The name had intrigued me. I figured I’d be getting an interactive DVD experience of navigable menus rife with multimedia joy. In reality, it was a rip of a VHS tape from the early 1990s. The ‘encyclopedia’ gimmick amounted to alphabetized segments and no more. ‘A’ is for Auto Racing, ‘B’ is for Baseball, ‘C’ is for Canoeing, and so on, et cetera. Two aspects of this experience stuck with me for years. The first, which stuck well enough that I not only recorded it off my TV screen with a camcorder in 2009 and uploaded it to YouTube but also remembered as I wrote this blog post in 2024 that I had recorded it off my TV screen with a camcorder in 2009 and uploaded it to YouTube, was that the voiceover guy used the phrase “Actually, dude, they’re bitchin'” in what I had figured was intended to be a family friendly sports blooper montage video:

The second aspect that stuck with me was the introspection that the sense of betrayal evoked. My first experience of getting ripped off (kid on the back of the bus in second grade took the decorative butterfly cupcake topper I had received alongside a cupcake for someone’s birthday and told me he’d only give it back to me once I gave him one of the legs of Exodia in the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game) happened unwillingly. My second experience of getting ripped off (bought Pokémon Channel for the GameCube after enjoying it as a rental, learned that I had basically done everything to do in the game during the week’s rental) taught me about the economic value of a trial run. This third experience reflected an emptiness held deep within me: I yearned for sports bloopers.

Follies. Blunders. Oopsies. Foul-Ups. A guy getting hit in the balls. I wanted them all, and the concept of an encyclopedia full of them had me throwing Lincolns at the disinterested store clerk working in a mall reduced to rubble within a decade’s time. To get so little in return… It sparked something. I don’t think it’s ever been quenched. The Internet Archive’s VHS Vault bends under the weight of sports blooper compilation tapes. I found FIFTEEN rips of sports blooper compilation tapes on the Archive. I am driven by an internal motor to search through these and find the best and worst that they have to offer. This is the mission of the Sports Blooper Compilation VHS Tape Superlative Review [SBCVHSTSR] series on Joe Bush dot Net.

We begin today with Simitar and Combined Artists, Inc.’s Sports Funnies from 1991.

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MEDIAN BLOOPER:

Before I truly begin, I should explain my methods. I watched this video from start to finish, treating each individual clip as a blooper of its own. This may be unfair, as I suppose some part of the enjoyment of a highlight reel like this is the sense of weight that every clip piling atop every other, but I find it the most scientific manner I can take to this. A “blooper” in this case, is basically anything that happens within a single cut in the video. 

To begin our examination, we must have a baseline from which to work. We need a control group. A median blooper. The above video represents what I found to be the most common sort of blooper in this compilation: There is a fast break in a college basketball game. The ballhandler runs into the defender, who falls down. The defender draws a charge. 

Experienced basketball fans will recognize this as a relatively mundane basketball play. This speaks poorly on the quality of blooper contained in Sports Funnies. It outstrips about half of the bloopers included, as a man falls down in it, but the man falls down intentionally and is rewarded for it by the referee. This was an intended play by the person who fell down, which I find indicative of a non-ideal blooper. What follows is the ideal blooper of the tape:

IDEAL BLOOPER:

This has all of the makings of a classic blooper: A player falls down. This player does not intend to fall down. The player falls down due to his hubris, as he loses his balance in celebration. The player loses something (a sure touchdown) by falling down. There’s even the irony of this blooper in a contest between two institutions of great subtextual gravitas: Brigham Young University and the United States Air Force Academy. There’s a clip that goes unflagged, too. It’s got everything, these three seconds. That’s the platonic ideal of a sports blooper. It’s not the best of the tape, but it is indicative of the fact that the directors could identify a good sports blooper. Another Ideal Blooper is this:

We have dramatic irony – A run-up, pole extended in front of our vaulter, undercut by the knowledge that the tape we’ve inserted in our VCR is entitled Sports Funnies and not Successful Pole Vaults of the Twentieth Century. As he approaches his vault, the blooperic potential of a pole vault attempt run through our minds: He could hit himself in the balls with the pole on the way down. He could hit himself in the balls on the bar he has to clear. He could let go of the pole accidentally and his momentum could carry him into the mat. The pole could snap.

When the pole snaps and he falls down, we feel satisfied. That is an ideal blooper. The Ultimate Blooper of this tape follows:

ULTIMATE BLOOPER

Jetski guy loses control of his jetski, momentum carries him forward, he does several cartwheels in the water. Jetski idles in place. Other jetskiier stops in place to watch. Good stuff. 

I would so much prefer for the ultimate blooper of this tape to be something better, and I welcome challengers to comb through this tape for something better if they so insist. I am biased by my interest in prat-falls, I will admit, but for this to be the peak indicates the relative mediocrity of this tape. I diagnose the source of this tape’s mediocrity as a footage problem, mostly. Far too much of this tape is built off of attempts to sell relatively mundane events within sports as funny events. For example, take the Least Blooper (Negative Connotation) of the tape:

LEAST BLOOPER (NEGATIVE CONNOTATION)

See, this is just a missed hockey shot. That happens all of the time. This happens several times in every hockey match. This happens in the baseball segment as well:

The third strike was dropped, so the catcher picked the ball up and tagged the batter. This happens several times every day in Major League Baseball. It’s perhaps not ideal for the catcher, nor the pitcher, nor the batter, but it’s not a blooper, per se. Also from the baseball segment:

Here, I fail to see what could even be described as a blooper. I fail to parse what the creators of this tape found interesting about this clip. This looks to be a minor league baseball game (the ad boards on the outfield wall make me lean towards the minor leagues rather than collegiate) in which a grounder gets past a third baseman and a runner scores. No amount of funny music and ironic voiceover can make this anything but a standard play. One of my favorite plays in baseball history was a play almost exactly like this. 

The accompanying commentary for this last blooper, which includes a jarring and gratuitous reference to the Klan, opens the door for me to discuss the production of the tape. This narrator straddles a line between smarmy and disinterested throughout in a performance that may well reflect the irony-soaked zeitgeist of 1991, but feels off-putting when set against the zany music and silly sports bloopers. He is also prone to monologuing. For example, take this uncomfortably long and meandering monologue, which teeters towards genuine domestic bitterness:

OFF-PUTTINGEST MONOLOGUE:

He begins by entering into a fake sales pitch for the concept of watching gymnastic bloopers, first with a kairotic appeal, referring to sports that were considered over-televised compared to their entertainment value in the 1980s: professional wrestling and roller derby. He follows with ethos, predicting an audience (men in unhappy relationships), offering gymastic bloopers as a salve for the bitterness that those unhappy relationships have drawn from them. I know not if both of these succeeded in the moment, thirty years-on, this reflects a person recording a voiceover job he resents and blowing off steam about a girlfriend that he also resents. This palpable resentment does not get me in the mood to laugh at people falling down. 

Even without the resentment, his narration is built on what feel like outlines of comedic observations without enough substance to land. Take this one from the soccer segment:

He identifies a societal touchstone: People consider soccer less violent than football. The joke he builds here is that the footage in the tape works against this assumption. The footage itself is not violent enough to cement the intended effect in place. At other times, he struggles against relatively mundane footage to find something to point and laugh at. Take this from the boxing segment:

These are just knockouts. The stumbles and bumbles at which he points are normal aspects of the boxing experience. I don’t envy his task in turning mundane aspects of boxing into comical japes and jokes, but my empathy does not make this any more enjoyable. The rest of the presentation of the tape is layered with as much complexity. I quite like the title cards for each segment:

Those are quite fine! It’s a bit hard to read that “FOOTBALL FOOLS” against the interlocking backdrop of football man ass, but otherwise, these are evocative enough. The video montage work has a tendency to become a tad gratuitous. For example:

MOST GRATUITOUS VIDEO EDITING

What I like about this is how it doesn’t sync up with the music. This could be an artifact of the rip itself, but even keeping that in mind I fail to see how this intends to match up with the beat. It also makes the actual blooper sort of difficult to discern in time — This is better, though, than another gratuitous edit of the basketball segment:

What are we doing here? Is that what you wanted to be as a video editor on VHS tapes in the early 1990s? Did you, Rebecca, credited video editor on this project, dream of this opportunity opening up for you as a child, to edit a video so that it looked sort of like a basketball player was grinding his ass on a referee? When JVC put together the low-cost, lower-quality alternative to Sony’s Betamax in the early 1980s, did they think it might lead to someone editing sports clips so that they looked sort of like a basketball player was grinding his ass on a referee? Unbelievable. Let’s get back to a blooper before I spiral further.

LEAST BLOOPER (POSITIVE CONNOTATION)

That was just cool. I think I saw Hot Sauce pass a ball off of an opponent’s head and back to himself before dunking on him on the And1 Streetball Tour on ESPN2 in the early 2000s. It’s a level of disrespect that I don’t think the Tennessee Volunteers basketball program would necessarily like to be associated with, but it’s very cool. That was a highlight, not a blooper. 

LEAST BLOOPER (NON-SPORTING CONNOTATION)

At worst, this is a basketball coach picking his nose. At best — and though I will admit myself a bit of an optimist when it comes to be the behaviors of others in this sort of situation, I think this is the more accurate interpretation — this is a basketball coach scratching his nose. That is not a blooper! That is not even a mundane sports play! That is a mundane act of life! You did not package this as Sports Mundane Acts of Life! You packaged this as Sports Funnies! That is not funny! 

 

This is just a mascot! This is just a mascot walking around! That cannot be understood as a blooper. That is hardly funny. That is just a tiger mascot walking. This is perhaps representative of the weaknesses of the film as a whole. They may have had lofty ideals. They may have wanted Jim Marshall running backwards and Tommy Lasorda fighting Youppi but what they were able to scrounge up was a tiger mascot walking back and forth. They were cursed by the mundane, by a world unable to deliver them enough evocative material to fill an entire tape. The most evocative material on the tape, in a strange paradox, was produced by the production and distribution companies themselves:

MOST SCARY VANITY PLATES:

Look, I haven’t been on TVTropes in a long while. I don’t know if people freaked out by old TV production company logos are pounding the pavement in the force that they once were. I don’t even think people still refer to these as “Vanity Plates” anymore. I was never particularly freaked out by one of these as a kid, though I hated Paul. I think being freaked out by these might’ve been a phenomenon limited to British children of the 1980s. Anyway, if you’re a British child from the 1980s, you may take interest at either of the above vanity plates. I see some potential in both. The Simitar one has the angellic choir and the robotic bass and the Combined Artists one has the repeating underlying gong going. It’s no creepy Russian mask, but it’ll do.

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Did we learn anything from this experience? I don’t believe so. I believe that I had a good time doing this and I intend to do it again in the future for that reason, but I will not pretend that this should have left you enlightened. Regardless, thank you for reading this if you got this far, and I apologize for posting the gymnastics monologue.