The Full Story of Puttin' on the Hits

A producer took his daughter to a local lip-sync contest, saw a business, and sold it to Dick Clark. A pre-fame Brad Pitt judged its mall auditions. A pre-fame Cuba Gooding Jr. competed on it and lost. Decades before anyone thought to make miming along to a record into prime-time entertainment, a syndicated show was already handing out twenty-five thousand dollars for it, to a severed head singing "I Ain't Got Nobody" and an Aretha Franklin drag act with couch cushions for a chest.

Puttin' on the Hits was a syndicated lip-sync competition created by Chris Bearde and executive-produced by Bearde and Dick Clark, hosted and written by Allen Fawcett. It premiered September 15, 1984, ran on weekends through July 3, 1988 across 134 episodes, and had amateur acts mime to hit records in costume while celebrity judges scored them for cash prizes up to $25,000. It is the direct ancestor of the TV lip-sync battle that Lip Sync Battle and RuPaul's Drag Race would later inherit.

The contest that became a show

Puttin' on the Hits did not start in a network office. It started in regional lip-sync contests developed by a man named William "Randy" Wood. According to the show's record, "Chris Bearde saw one of the contests with his daughter. He then created, developed and sold Puttin' on the Hits with Bearde and Dick Clark serving as executive producers." Bearde was a veteran of Laugh-In and The Gong Show, which is to say he knew exactly how to package cheerful chaos. Dick Clark's son, R.A. Clark, produced, MCA Television distributed, and the show taped in Hollywood at Universal City Studios.

Wood stayed on as a consulting producer, and he is the one maker still actively telling the show's story: he told Yahoo Entertainment in 2019 that he was working on a book about its history. The host and co-writer, Allen Fawcett, was a soap actor from The Edge of Night and General Hospital and a Broadway veteran who had played the title role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By his own account he was involved in all 134 episodes.

The title, for the record, was a nod to Irving Berlin's 1929 song "Puttin' on the Ritz," which had come back into the air in 1983.

How the game worked

The format was simple and the executions were not. Amateur acts lip-synched to popular songs, and, in the words of the show's record, "contestants would often dress up in costumes and use props to make their act more outrageous." A panel of celebrity judges scored each act on originality, appearance, and lip-sync ability, awarding up to ten points per category for a possible ninety, with the judges breaking any tie themselves.

The money was real and the ladder was steep. Each season ran as a tournament: winning a preliminary round paid $1,000, a semifinal win paid $5,000, and the season's grand championship paid $25,000. Every contestant went home with gifts and, in a nice pre-YouTube touch, a videotape of their own performance. At the end of the fourth season, the show brought its three previous champions back to face the newest winner, with another $25,000 on the line.

The most '80s thing ever

The reason Puttin' on the Hits is remembered at all is the sheer strangeness of what people did on it. The show's own record preserves the range: acts ran "from a seemingly severed head singing 'I Ain't Got Nobody' to an Aretha Franklin drag act using couch cushions for breasts," alongside more earnest performers who simply wanted to nail the moves.

The guest-judge roster and the audition line read like an 80s time capsule. In its 2019 retrospective, Yahoo Entertainment catalogued the judges as including Helen Reddy, Paul Williams, Stephanie Mills, Marilyn McCoo, Eagles guitarist Don Felder, and actress Linda Blair, and reported that "a pre-superstardom Growing Pains / Dallas actor Brad Pitt once even served as a celebrity judge for the show's open-call auditions at some Dallas shopping mall." Cuba Gooding Jr. competed on the program in 1985 and, per the same account, lost. Kato Kaelin, a decade before the O.J. Simpson trial made him a household name, turned up as a contestant in the third season. The show is also credited with launching the R&B group Troop and the drag performer Jazzmun.

The ancestor of the lip-sync battle

It is easy to file Puttin' on the Hits under 80s kitsch and move on, but it sits at the head of a genre that never went away. As Yahoo Entertainment framed the lineage in 2019: "Decades before Jimmy Fallon's Lip Sync Battle, way before RuPaul demanded that drag queens lip-sync for their lives, there was Puttin' on the Hits." The show made a competitive sport out of miming to a record, complete with judges, brackets, and prize money, years before any of its more famous descendants.

It even spun off a kids' edition. A short-lived version called Puttin' on the Kids, hosted by Michael Young, aired in the 1986 to 1987 season in syndication, handing savings bonds to weekly winners. The parent show belongs to the same living-room tradition as karaoke nights and talent-show tapings: ordinary people performing other people's hits and being judged for it, which turned out to be one of the most durable formats in television.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 1984 to 1988. The show airs in syndication and is documented mostly by TV listings and the tapes themselves, with little behind-the-scenes press at the time.
• 2019, Yahoo Entertainment. For the 35th anniversary, Lyndsey Parker's retrospective assembles the show's wildest details and its unlikely celebrity roster, and gets consulting producer Randy Wood on record confirming he is writing a book about its history.
• Ongoing, YouTube. The clearest surviving record is the footage itself, preserved by fans as VCR-tracking-challenged uploads, which is how most people rediscover the show at all.

The honest note is that the makers' full account is still being written, literally, in Wood's unpublished book. What can be verified today is the origin, the format, the prize ladder, and the roster of who passed through, and the rest lives on tape rather than in interviews.

The honest bottom line

Puttin' on the Hits was a cheap syndicated show about people pretending to sing, judged by whoever was available that week, taped in a corner of a studio lot. It has no business being memorable. But it got one big thing right long before anyone else did: watching regular people commit completely to lip-syncing a hit, in costume, for real stakes, is genuinely entertaining. Lip Sync Battle, RuPaul's "lip-sync for your life," and every karaoke competition since are all playing a game this show invented for a $25,000 check and a complimentary videotape.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Puttin' on the Hits" (air dates, origin, format, prize structure, notable contestants, and the Puttin' on the Kids spinoff, cross-checked).
• Yahoo Entertainment, "Remembering 'Puttin' on the Hits,' the most bonkers TV talent show of all time," Lyndsey Parker, 2019 (celebrity roster, Brad Pitt and Cuba Gooding Jr. details, and consulting producer Randy Wood on his forthcoming book).
• HarryAllenFawcett.com, official biography of host and co-writer Allen Fawcett (his role across all 134 episodes and career background).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Star Search and the full story of You Can't Do That on Television.

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