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Originally appeared on E! Online
You get to know how Oprah Winfrey pulled off one of the most iconic TV moments at the eleventh hour.
The former daytime host revealed how she had to shift into high gear ahead of the famous 2004 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, in which she gave away 276 cars—worth over $7 million. As Winfrey explained in a new interview, she made one very important change to the boxes being given to every audience member at the very last moment.
“I remember in the middle of the night that we hadn't taped the keys down in the boxes,” Winfrey shared with Vanity Fair in a video posted to YouTube July 21. “It occurred to me and I said to the producers—who were up all night long, actually, for this show—‘You gotta tape the keys in the boxes.’ Because people, the first thing you’re gonna do is shake the box.”
Keeping it a secret that everyone was getting a car was a huge part of the surprise, as she and her team had made it seem as if there would only be 12 recipients.
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“We had given out 11 cars on this particular day, and there was the 12th car,” the 72-year-old explained. “There was supposedly one car left and everybody was thinking they were going to be that one person.”
In fact, the reason Winfrey ended up yelling her now iconic, “You get a car. You get a car. Everybody gets a car,” was because the audience didn’t understand exactly what was happening.
“That first woman, that first Black woman, who goes, ‘I got it. It’s me.’ And then someone next to her said, ‘No, I got it, I got it.’ So I thought, ‘Oh, we're gonna have pandemonium with everybody thinking, 'No, I'm the one that got it.’ I was screaming it because they were screaming so loud,” she said. “Nobody could hear what I was saying.”
It was at that point that Winfrey led the audience members outside to see their new 2005 Pontiac G6 sedans that were all decorated with giant red bows.
And it wasn’t just the gift boxes that required a last-minute change. The bows had caused their own problems as well, with Winfrey’s team staying up all night to swap out the decor.
“You needed the bow to cover the whole car. And when I went through and I saw them, I went, ‘All these bows have to go because they're too small. We need larger bows.’ Because what you want to be able to do is to drive the car home and have the big bow when you get there,” she reasoned. “You don't want those little Christmas bows that are the little pointy things. You don't want that. You want a big bow.”
In addition to her producers, the TV icon had one more person to thank for pulling off the stunt: her best friend Gayle King, who suggested they give the cars away following a chance meeting with a car executive who’d been hoping to get in touch with Winfrey’s show.
“I said, 'I'll take your card and pass it along to her team.' And I couldn't get to the phone fast enough,” King shared with People’s Pop Cultured in 2022. “And then from there, then the question became, ‘How do we execute it?’”
The episode quickly became a fan favorite—even spawning a meme of Winfrey—and it's one Winfrey will always hold dear to her heart, too.
"That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she shared on the Pop Cultured episode. "It delights me, it makes me so happy, to see other people be happy and to be able to do that. That's one of the great joys of my life."
For a deep dive into some of the fascinating facts about Winfrey’s storied career, keep reading.
