‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ continues its legacy
Sunday night slapstick: There’s no better way to decompress at the end of the day than to binge watch compilation videos of other people’s misfortunes caught on camera. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is the show that gave rise to this timehonored tradition, and it’s coming back for its 29th season on Sunday, Sept. 30, on ABC.
Since 1989, “AFHV” has provided audiences with a steady stream of homemade hilarity that appeals to our basest sense of guilty pleasure, featuring clips of people hurting themselves, animals behaving badly and kids performing “epic fails.” As the host presents the fan-submitted videos, a live studio audience votes on the clips that make them laugh the hardest, producing first-, second- and third-place winners each week.
The show’s current host, actor Alfonso Ribeiro (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), took over the role from Tom Bergeron in 2015, and has brought his high-energy brand of charming corniness to the show ever since. He has said that he loves being part of the show because he has watched it for many years, and it’s “a show that you can sit down [to watch] with your family, relax, you don’t have to think; you know you’re going to laugh” (BUILD Series).
This ideal of wholesome, mindless family fun is the tenet that has maintained “AFHV’s” iron-clad status as a Sunday night tradition for an astounding 28 years and counting. Just to up the stakes, “AFHV” also awards weekly $10,000 prizes to the first-place winner, who then moves on to a $100,000 prize round. At the end of the season, finalist videos compete for a grand prize vacation package. Last year, the ultimate prize included a “Bahamian cruise aboard Disney Cruise Line [and] a Costa Rican guided group vacation with Adventures by Disney,” according to abc. com.The season 29 grand prize has yet to be announced.
If you’re up for another season of laughs, you can tune in for the season premiere of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” when it airs Sunday, Sept. 30, on ABC.
Retro rides revived: Scott and Tod Warmack are proving that vintage muscle cars still have some glory days left to live. The car aficionado brothers went into business together restoring vintage models in 2011, and now, seven years later, audiences can get an in-depth look at how they go about their craft when the premiere of their new show, “Trans Am,” airs Tuesday, Oct. 2, on Discovery.
The Trans-American Championship is a car racing series that began in 1966, and while it’s still popular today, the nostalgia of the old generation rides such as the Chevrolet Camaro, the Plymouth Barracuda and the Pontiac Firebird makes them the timeless icons of the series.
Scott and Tod Warmack, a builder and a businessman, respectively, have always been passionate about these original models, so in 2011, in collaboration with graphic designer Jim Dowling, they bought the exclusive rights to the Trans Am brand and opened the Trans Am Depot in Tallahassee, Florida. The popular depot restores vintage race cars and also soups up contemporary muscle cars to give clients a retro feel and esthetic.
In 2016, the depot was even endorsed by actor Burt Reynolds, a notable spokesperson given that his 1977 film, “Smokey and the Bandit,” iconically featured a Pontiac Firebird.According to Discovery’s website, “Trans Am” will offer an unprecedented peek into the Warmacks’ incredible restoration process as “the brothers and their team of talented car savants re-engineer and meticulously craft classic icons from the inside out.”
Car savants will have a new reason to geek out when the series premiere of “Trans Am” airs Tuesday, Oct. 2, on Discovery.