Jan 25th, 2010 by Ross Edwards
During his last week on the Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien did several skits dedicated not to being funny, but to costing NBC as much money as possible. His first supposedly super-expensive sketch featured a million-dollar Bugatti Veyron dressed as a mouse. Now it turns out that despite Conan’s obvious desire to hurt NBC financially, he wasn’t completely honest about how much the skit cost.
Conan claimed that the Bugatti Veyron Mouse’s MSRP of $1 million, combined with the its theme song, “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, which is apparently a very expensive song to play on air, brought the sketch’s cost to $1.5 million. According to Jalopnik, the Bugatti Veyron was lent to Conan for the skit for free by the founder of the Peterson Museum, Bob Peterson. All that NBC had to pay for was the transportation and the mouse costume.
Conan admitted that the super-expensive skits were fakes while addressing the concerns of Internet users who accused him of squandering money that could have been better spent elsewhere. The skit wasn’t a complete fake though. Apparently with the Rolling Stones song, the skit was too expensive to rebroadcast on the Internet, so NBC has pulled it from the Web.
Picture via Jalopnik.