When you think of “The Big Bang Theory,” you probably think of a few recognizable things. “The nerds.” A laughing song. The coined word is “basinga”. So what's the latest deal? Why Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, in the CBS comedy Tell Me? According to the oral history of the series, the answer is Beautiful Ridiculous.
In “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series” by Jessica Radloff, some of the show's stars and creative team talk about “Bazinga” and how it became part of the show. Although Sheldon said it in the second season of the series, it actually became a “catchphrase” in the Season 3 episode “Einstein's Approximation”, which Radloff noted was typically a “ball pit episode”. According to showrunner and executive producer Steve Molaro, the series' writing team was trying to find something funny for Sheldon in the episode, and they were inspired by a colleague.
When Sheldon runs loose in a ball pit (which will end soon), he makes a joke, and as Molaro explained, his co-showrunner and creator Chuck Lorre wanted the audience to know that Sheldon is being purposely cheeky in this. moment. While the show's creators were trying to figure it out, Molaro recalls, they had a key of their own: writer Stephen Engel. “Stephen deliberately made terrible jokes in the writers' room, as funny as a bedroom piece,” Molaro Radloff said. “He would eat a grapefruit, and when he finished his grapefruit, he would tape the two halves back together and say, 'Hey, would anyone like a grapefruit?' “Sure, Stephen, this grape is amazing,” you say. Knowing that the two parts were taped together, we'd take them apart and he'd say, 'Haha, basinga, got you!' Where it came from, it's actually a boring story.
The term Bazinga arose completely unexpectedly for the Big Bang Theory team
The thing about having a “tagline” is that at some point it starts to suck. You can't change joke taglines when you have no options: it's complicated. To give full credit to the creative team behind “The Big Bang Theory,” they knew that the shelf life of “Bazinga” would be too short. Unfortunately, it was already overwhelming…even for the show. I basically stopped using it Once it became popular.
“We had a complicated relationship with Basinga because we felt it was becoming a bit of a catchphrase, so we abandoned it completely,” said writer Steve Holland. “After season 4 or 5, we never said it, but it was always related to 'Big Bang'. Sometimes as a joke, if people say it 30 times, we couldn't get away with it in 279 episodes and it was part of the identifying characteristics of the program.
Chuck Lorre, the show's creator, admitted that the damage had already been done, and Holland commented that the second Sheldon was the first to say “basinga,” but he was already adorning fans' clothing. “We said, 'Oh no, we don't need a funny slogan. We don't want to go down that path; It was a cheap way,” Lorre remembers. “But no one disagrees with us. They all wrote about it as part of the show. When it became a t-shirt we abandoned it immediately. We still can't escape it, but there's no harm. “There was no mistake at the time, we were trying to grow the show, and a show with catchphrases was not a show we wanted to do.”
Bassinga was a small part of The Big Bang Theory, but he became a big part of the show's legacy.
Unsurprisingly, the “Big Bang Theory” team immediately worried that “Bazinga” would get out of control and make the show intolerable. “I was afraid it would lose its appeal,” Steve Molaro explained in Radloff's book. “Those phrases are a double-edged sword. “If we are going to mention the word, there has to be a good reason or a joke.” So how did star Jim Parsons feel about it? He didn't really care, but he knew it always had something to do with Sheldon Cooper.
In fact, thanks to fans' fixation on “Bazinga,” Parsons began experiencing the Mandela Effect regarding the word dumb. “I fell into the trap of people thinking I said that all the time on the show, but the truth is I didn't,” Parsons admitted. “What I did was I signed my face and that word a lot on t-shirts, so in that way, I have kind of an 'E' relationship with that word. It meant nothing to me emotionally. But each one felt it very deeply in their own way.”
When it came time to film the ball pit episode, Basinga said there was no big problem.
—Basinga! If you're an actor, it may seem like a bad feeling rather than a joke, but the worst part of this whole situation is Jim Parsons and his “Big Bang Theory” co-star Johnny Galecki, who plays Sheldon's best friend Leonard Hofstadter. – Filming the scene was very uncomfortable. In the episode, everyone is completely fed up with Sheldon because, while working on a research project, he refuses to sleep; Eventually, he becomes so obsessed that he enters a mall ball pit and forces Leonard to chase him while yelling “Bazinga!” As Parsons explains in Jessica Radloff's book, she “hated” filming this scene because, in fact, it was In fact Total.
“It was much more difficult than one imagines, or would have imagined. The balls were very dirty. I had to go to the bathroom during a break while we were filming that scene, and I wiped my hands on these paper towels, and I realized that I was covered in a light gray color because of these balls, and I'm really upset. but I wouldn't do anything for a scene. Snakes, monkeys and God knows what else.” (Parsons went on to admit, “I mean, I get paid, so that was it. Maybe I'd look for a paycheck. I don't know. But I did.”)
Anyway, if you want to hear Parsons shout “Bazinga!” While locked in a dirty ball pit, “The Einstein Approximation” is currently available to stream on Max along with “The Big Bang Theory.”
