We loved The Rosie O’Donnell Show. We loved it because it was in large part a show about the little things and big things Rosie LOVED, like Entemann’s and Tom Cruise and Barbra and Happy Meal toys. That is an attitude that spoke to us as children but also as adults. That’s why we devoted a whole week to the Rosie O’Donnell show this fall, marking the 20th anniversary of its premiere. We love a lot of things, but possibly not as much as Rosie O’Donnell did.
M: Entenmann’s baked goods reminded Rosie O’Donnell of the Long Island mom-types during her childhood playing bridge or whatever it was that Long Island moms did in the 60s. And now, Entenmann’s baked goods remind me of Rosie O’Donnell. I don’t know her position on TastyCakes.
T: I do know her position on Ring Dings, because audience members got that and milk before the show.
Koosh balls
T: There are few talk show hosts who can get away with launching rubber balls into the audience and make it look cool. Just imagine Oprah doing this for a second. And that’s OPRAH. When Rosie flung these into the crowd, it suddenly became an interactive show and added a sense of innocent fun unlike any other talk show on TV. It became so synonymous with her show that Koosh sold a special Rosie O’Donnell Show version of their Koosh Fling Shot, as seen here and the one sitting at my home collecting dust.
M: I got one of these at the store after the NBC tour, c. 1998. I don’t keep things so I got rid of it sometime in high school, but I sort of wish I still had it.
Tom Cruise
T: If there’s anything you took away from watching Rosie in the 90s, it’s that she had an obsession with two people: Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand. If you recall, Rosie had a soundboard that played audio clips next to her desk, and anytime she’d talk about her deep love for her celebrity crush, she’d play “Tommy, can you hear me?” a line from a song of the same name by The Who. She campaigned for him to be on her show, and when he finally made it, it was like watching Jim and Pam kiss for the first time. Rosie invited fans into her life by sharing personal anecdotes that made it seem we had been friends growing up in Commack, Long Island, and we were cheering her on as she lived out life long dream. I mean, while rewatching this clip, I legitimately said out loud (to no one), “THIS BRINGS ME SO MUCH JOY!” Especially if you forget about all of Tom Cruise’s persona.
M: When we were doing our Rosie Week research this summer, we were both floored by how quickly into the show’s run Tom appeared (plus a few others, like Donny Osmond). The buildup was so huge that at the time, it felt like years before “my Tommy” was a Rosie guest.
The Rosie O’Donnell Show ran from 1996 to 2002, and even though we watched it to the bitter end we somehow always associate it with the ’90s. When I think of Rosie guests, it’s people like Macy Gray, cast members from Ally McBeal, and throwbacks to Rosie’s 1970s childhood like the Osmonds. However, there are some modern stars we always forget were active in the Rosie era, so it feels like a total time warp seeing them as guests on The Rosie O’Donnell Show.
The Cast Of Harry Potter
Harry Potter and The Rosie O’Donnell Show had a brief overlap – Rosie even campaigned to play Molly Weasley, and while Julie Walters defined the role I bet she would have been great. However, with the last movie coming out in 2011 I tend to forget that Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone was a 2001 release: firmly in the early 2000s. It doesn’t seem possible that it has been 15 years since Harry Potter first hit the big screen, until you see how tiny the kids were here and it feels like when one of your friends posts a #TBT baby picture.
Mae Whitman
We have long loved Mae Whitman as Parenthood’s Amber Braverman, a real-life Friday Night Lights superfan, Ann Veal (her?), and a Dawson’s Creek Live Reading participant. But let’s not forget that before all this, she was one of those 90s child actors who was in EVERYTHING. You might remember Mae from One Fine Day, When A Man Loves A Woman, Independence Day, and as Sandra Bullock’s daughter in Hope Floats. It’s rare that a child actor maintains such a solid career through adolescence and adulthood. It’s even more rare to create such distinct child and adult personas that we almost forget this adorable moppet is the same cool girl who cracks us up on Twitter on a weekly basis.
Lea Michele
Lea Michele first entered our consciousness thanks to Spring Awakening, but there’s a wide audience who didn’t really know who she was until Glee. We didn’t know it, but we were actually familiar with little Lea long before that. In 1998, Ragtime was all the rage (in our circles, anyway) and Lea was the wide-eyed, precocious little girl. Also: AUDRA.
Jimmy Fallon
We certainly knew Jimmy was around in 2001 – we had massive crushes on him that we’d discuss in study hall and at lunch – but it was early in his SNL career and he wasn’t really doing much press yet, so it’s surprising that he was on Rosie. We had no clue he’d be a wildly popular talk show host in his own right over ten years later.
Alas, there is no video of the appearance, so enjoy this photo of Jimmy and Horatio Sanz as Rosie.
Lil Bow Wow
I know he was lil when he started, but Bow Wow as an actual child rapper on Rosie is something I cannot quite remember. But it’s true, he was there – sadly, with no video to prove it. Woof.
Jennifer Garner
Jennifer may be a rom-com and movie mom favorite now, but in the early 2000s she was best known as the star of Alias … to other people. To us she was primarily the flirty, 30 and thriving Jenna Rink in 13 Going On 30, which didn’t come out until 2004. That’s why it feels so weird knowing that Garner was on Rosie in 2001 promoting Alias, a show I admittedly never watched.
Lauren Graham
We briefly mentioned Lauren’s appearance earlier this week, as she showed off her “skills” during a craft corner segment on Rosie’s last show of the series. But months before, and nearing the end of season two of Gilmore Girls, Lauren appeared on the show for the first time, and Lo and Ro kicked it off right away. I have always been a fan of LG’s TV interviews because she always comes off charismatic, fun and awkward all at the same time (see: all Ellen interviews), and in 2002, this was just the beginning of Lauren’s rise to fame and her journey with Gilmore Girls. BECAUSE I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S HAPPENING.
Hayden Panettiere
I sometimes forget Hayden was a child actor. But then I remember she played Ally McBeal’s daughter and it all comes screaming back to me. Before she played a country music star on Nashville, she proved she had the chops to be a pop star by singing Britney’s (You Drive Me) Crazy during this interview and bless her heart, it feels like she’s been practicing the bit with her stage mom, whom she keeps looking at off camera. Young Hayden is cute, but I think I prefer confident adult Hayden much better.
Josh Groban
Speaking of Ally McBeal… actually, let’s back up a bit. Josh Groban was just 17 years old when superproducer David Foster called Josh’s vocal coach asking if he had any students good enough to rehearse with Celine Dion at the 1999 Grammys. She was set to perform The Prayer with Andrea Boccelli, but because he couldn’t make it, Josh filled in, and Rosie was in awe after hearing him during rehearsals – this was the year she hosted the Grammys. She invited him to her show, as seen above, and because of this interview, Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley created a role for Josh on his show, and the rest is history. Also, Josh is so nervous and shy here it’s adorable and nothing like what he is now.
Lea DeLaria and Jesse Tyler Ferguson
Sometimes when you know actors from two completely different shows, it throws you off when you hear they’ve been friends for years. That is the case for Orange is the New Black’s Lea DeLaria and Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who both starred on Broadway long before their respective award-winning shows. Here they are performing a number from On the Town, and it’s nothing like you’ve seen them before. Ok, maybe excluding Jesse.
Kobe Bryant
When doing research for this, I saw the third guest in a season one episode titled as “High school student and NBA draftee Kobe Bryant”. I’m not even a big basketball fan, but this is iconic. Kobe, 18 at the time, had signed a three-year $3.5 million contract with the Lakers and he hadn’t even played college basketball. Again, like Bow Wow video from 1998 is scarce, so just trust he was on the show.
Kate Winslet
Technically Kate had a few films under her belt before this interview, but it’s just a treasure of a vid because she is actually doing press for Titanic. It’s her first time on the show, and Rosie wishes her the best of luck as an actress. And like we all knew in that steerage party when she went up on her toes, she’s been knocking it out ever since. Also she talks about Leo and their true love.
BONUS:
When the maybe first female president sings a Bye Bye Birdie song. Also note Rosie in her Rosie-est getup.
The world was different in 1996, when The Rosie O’Donnell Show began. The famous Ellen DeGeneres coming out episode hadn’t aired yet, Will & Grace was still years away, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was only a few years old. As much as the internet loves to act like 2016 is a trash-lined sewer and the ’90s were a hip, inclusive wonderland, things have gotten a lot better in the past two decades. We were different in 1996, too: we were 10 years old. We knew that gay people existed, but in that era we both tended to assume people were straight unless given evidence to the contrary. A LOT of evidence to the contrary. Rosie’s presence as an affable, cool lesbian paved the way for today’s suburban mom fav, Ellen, and her wide-open closet door was probably really inspiring to a lot of kids in the 90s and 2000s… the kids who weren’t too dense to notice all of these clues, anyway.
Exhibit A: Tom Cruise, Lawnboy
The facts:
Throughout the course of her show, Rosie talked a lot about her giddy crush on Tom Cruise.
She called him “My Tommy.”
A specialized soundboard played The Who’s “Tommy Can You Hear Me”
The whole thing read less like a legitimate infatuation, and more as a fun running gag
To that end, Rosie even TOLD everybody that she had no adult desire for Tom Cruise:
My crush on him has nothing to do with anything that is adult. It’s a prepubescent girl desire to have his picture thumb-tacked to my bedroom wall. It doesn’t have to do with a thirty-five-year-old woman’s adult desire.
On Tom’s first appearance, he brought flowers and didn’t respond like someone at the receiving end of a real and genuine crush. Rosie commented “it’s not like I want the marriage to break up. I just want you to, like, live in my house and mow my lawn. That’s all I want. I want you to do yard work around my house.” As a single lady who hates lawn mowing, I feel that.
Rosie, referring to Nicole Kidman, lightheartedly commented “isn’t her husband beautiful”
The Rosie O’Donnell Show ended with Tom mowing Rosie’s lawn and offering her a lemonade.
Can you blame us?: I mean. As adults of 2016 we realize that having an opposite-sex crush doesn’t make you straight any more than having a favorite Orange Is The New Black inmate makes you gay. However, this one is less about the cultural milieu of the 90s and more about what it was like to be ten years old. If you told somebody you had a crush in fifth grade, it was SERIOUS BUSINESS. It’s more that we couldn’t understand flippant celebrity crushes, which are now the mainstay of our internet presence.
Exhibit B: And They Called It Puppy Love
The facts:
Donny Osmond’s poster was on her bedroom wall “for eight years” when she was a tot
Rosie was a member of the Donny Osmond Fan Club. Like the kind where you pay a fee and you get a sticker with his face on it.
She owned a Donny Osmond doll. Her brothers wanted to play GI Joe, she wanted to play Donny and Marie.
Rosie: Me and my brother Danny would do Donny & Marie in my backyard with wooden spoons. My mother would be screaming…
Donny: Ok, but hopefully, you were Marie.
Rosie: Most times. But ya know, hell, I’ll be you if you let me.
Can you blame us?: Like Tom Cruise, we kind of just expected that because Rosie had googly eyes and a laminated Donny Osmond Fan Club membership card in her wallet, it meant she was keen on the gentlemen type.
I remember one time around this era I was talking to an older male family friend who was at the time probably in high school, and while a group of us were watching TV, Rosie came on the screen and he said, “You know she’s gay, right?” and being a staunch fan and a 12 year old who believed “gay” was an insult, I came to her defense. “No way. She loves Tom Cruise and Donny Osmond! How do you explain that??” But again, that was just a sign of the times. Obviously as a tween in the mid-90s, I couldn’t delineate between celebrity crush to real life romantic feelings crush, so my points sounded valid at the moment.
But this is kind of all a moot point since Ro and Donny got into a brief feud after he suggested she was fat by saying a helicopter “couldn’t take that much weight.” She turned that Donny doll into more of a Donny voodoo doll, and made him apologize by singing Puppy Love in a puppy get up. Don’t all great straight relationships work like this?
Exhibit C: Lebanese-American
The facts:
For a period of time in 1996, there was a long lead-up to Ellen DeGeneres’s character, Ellen Morgan, coming out on the sitcom Ellen. I still remember thinking it was cool, but also consistently thinking it had happened already because it had been in the media for so long. That’s how big a deal it was.
Before the episode aired, Ellen appeared on Rosie. Later on, Rosie said that she didn’t want Ellen to be completely alone on this new TV frontier, so they came up with the Lebanese bit and “the people that got it, got it.”
We didn’t get it.
Watch it and let Rosie explain here:
“I pick up sometimes that you might be Lebanese”
Can you blame us? This is the kind of joke that would be hard to understand if you were new to the English language. Lebanese and Lesbian sound sort of similar, Ellen’s quip about dropping hints that character was “Lebanese” (baba ganoush, Casey Kasem, etc) is an analogy to Ellen winking at her character’s orientation, but the punchline was implied. And implied punch lines are one of the last things you understand when you learn a new language, right? Except… we were NOT new to the English language when this aired, we were natives like 10 years deep in it. Even as kids, we should have picked up what Rosie was putting down here.
It’s Day 2 of Everything’s Coming Up Rosie Week, and we’re bringing back a recurring series, Things I’m Willing To Believe About ___, where we compile fake facts that seem… sort of plausible. Today we are spotlighting the Queen of Nice, Rosie O’Donnell. We are willing to believe that Rosie:
Had an early showbiz dream to appear as either the newest Brady Bunch kid or newest Partridge Family member.
Secretly sells art on Society6 under the pseudonym Katie Morosky
Hasn’t been able to let go of all the cassette tapes of Ryan’s Hope she recorded from the ’80s (she didn’t have a VCR back then so she recorded the audio, duh).
Has a permanent reserved seat at Hamilton, like how people in the 1800s used to have reserved pews at church. The only reason she hasn’t been MORE times is that she keeps giving the tickets away.
Is a generally peace-loving person, except that she can hear a North Shore vs South Shore argument from seemingly blocks away and will jump in.
Has not one but TWO dedicated craft/art studios in her home
Once had a house decorated with 100% decoupaged furniture. Made a concerted effort to scale back. Occasional pieces still surface at the Commack Volunteers of America Thrift Store.
Has had so many millennials come up to her telling her that her show “practically raised me” that she has had to stop agreeing to be listed as their emergency contact, after two such millennials were injured in trust falls on the same day.
Didn’t actually sign this autographed headshot that still sits in a frame on my childhood bed headboard
true story: i made my mom take a photo of this and send it to me. she doesn’t know how to take a pic on her phone and text it, but DOES not how to take a pic on her ipad and email it. hence the reflection. WOOF.
Auditioned to play the lead of Polly in Crazy For You on Broadway but lost out to Jodi Benson (aka Ariel of The Little Mermaid fame)
Her deepest secret: “not really a cat person.”
Steven Pasquale would be her modern day/Broadway Tom Cruise-esque crush if she still had her talk show
Turns out to be A.D. in the series finale on Pretty Little Liars as a favor to Marlene King (who wrote Now and Then)
Knows that Now and Then is an American classic, she just doesn’t want to make a big deal about it.
Despite the movie being questionable, Rosie secretly took home her Exit to Eden costume “just in case”
Lobbied extensively during the filming of Harriet The Spy to have Harriet’s beloved tomato sandwich swapped for something “less disgusting.”
Owns Donald Tr*mp voodoo doll
Super tempted to pull a Michael Jordan and take back her talk show from Caroline Rhea after six months
Caroline Rhea was her second choice for a replacement. Kristin Chenoweth was first.
Geena Davis taught her archery on the set of A League of Their Own
Still texts/emails/calls A League of Their Own & Sleepless In Seattle homeboy Tom Hanks for advice
Asked British boy band BBMak if they wanted to do a duet with her on her Another Rosie Christmas album, but they respectfully declined citing an “effort to protect their brand”
Kangol sent Ro hundreds of free hats that she couldn’t possibly wear herself, so that’s why anyone who shopped at Goodwill or Salvation Army in the Greater New York City area between 1996 and 1999 are owners of said accessory
Had Mormon missionaries visit her house weekly for YEARS in an attempt to capitalize on her love for Donny Osmond. It didn’t take.
Goes without saying, her Tom Cruise obsession caused similar problems. She does not want a free personality test, thank you very much.
Secretly made the Internet with Al Gore and sneakily popularized it with her show
Is still really good friends with Madonna, and is (secretly) the only person allowed to shorten her name to “Maddie.”
Tom Cruise is on her Christmas card list, but every year she worries it could be some sort of Scientologist faux pas.
Forced John McDaniel to spill all the juicy details on working closely with Patti LuPone, and wouldn’t give him the job of musical director on her talk show until he caved
Still keeps in touch with Kathy Del Bel Baluz (sp?) from Toronto, Canada and they exchange notes about wall stenciling.
Once prank called Elisabeth Hasselbeck and asked if her refrigerator was running
Gets free bus rides from the MTA ever since Riding the Bus with my Sister aired
On the days she misses being a talk show host, she makes her kids be her guests, and acts it all out in the replica of her Rosie show set in her home
Yes, it IS cute when they change “Tommy Can You Hear Me” to “Mommy Can You Hear Me,” thank you very much.
Cookies + Sangria 