SerpApi.Org
The 2004 car giveaway episode remains one of the most memorable “Oprah Winfrey Show” moments, with the host exclaiming, “You get a car! You get a car!”
Key Points
Oprah Winfrey has opened up about a major change she made to her iconic talk show’s 2004 car giveaway episode.
Winfrey said she made a significant change to the way the cars were given to the audience.
The star revealed that she “remembered in the middle of the night” something that the crew overlooked while planning.
The iconic 2004 car giveaway episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show nearly spoiled its own headline-making surprise, according to legendary talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey.
In a new interview about the most memorable moments of her career, Winfrey reflected on preparing to launch the instantly notable episode over two decades ago, with the star clapping as she repeatedly exclaimed, “I love this!” during a chat with Vanity Fair (below).
Speaking about a significant change she made hours before the episode rolled out, Winfrey revealed that she “remembered in the middle of the night that we hadn’t taped the keys down in the boxes” that the show planned to gift to unsuspecting audience members, who each received their own individual vehicles on the installment.
“And it occurred to me, and I said to the producers, who were up all night long, actually, for this show, ‘We’ve got to tape the keys in the boxes because the first thing people are going to do is shake the box,’” Winfrey recalled. “I don’t know if people know this, but we had already given out 11 cars. We’d given out 11 cars on this particular day. There was this 12th car, there was supposedly one car left, and everybody was thinking they were going to be that one person.”
So, when the show surprised all audience members with keys to a car inside the gift boxes, Winfrey had to shout the often-meme’d quote, “You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” to clarify that each studio audience attendee would, in fact, receive a car.
“That first Black woman who goes, ‘I got it, it’s me!’ Then someone next to her said, ‘No, I got it! I got it!’ I thought, oh, we’re going to have pandemonium with everybody thinking, no, I’m the one that got it,” Winfrey admitted. “I was screaming because they were screaming so loud, nobody could hear what I was saying.”
She also said that her longtime friend, Gayle King, advised her against wearing the red Celine suit she ultimately donned for the episode.
“Gayle, whose idea it was to give away the cars, by the way, was at this show, and she comes into my dressing room and she goes, ‘You’re not wearing that, are you?’” remembered Winfrey, who said King wanted something more fun.
But Winfrey told her the crimson suit matched “the bows on the cars, Gayle,” and wore it anyway.
“The day before when the bows first came, the bows were too small. That’s why everybody was up all night long,” Winfrey added, referencing a portion of the episode where the audience was led to a lot filled with the prize cars, all adorned with large red bows. “When I went through, and I saw them, I went, ‘All these bows have to go because they’re too small,’” adding, “There’s a shot of me somewhere with the red suit on and the red bows, and it worked, Gayle!”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
The September 2004 episode of the show instantly became a pop culture phenomenon, with Winfrey’s energy inspiring countless memes over the last 22 years, and the installment becoming one of the most heavily referenced in The Oprah Winfrey Show history.
Watch Winfrey discuss the iconic car giveaway moment above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
