Uploaded November 2013 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Long before ESPN was doing it with off-the-wall SportsCenter promos, I was going a little bit crazy trying to make a sports talk show promo cute. The story behind this is... a bit strange. One of our sales guys told me he could borrow a neighbor's potbelly piglet, with the idea that we'd make some kind of crazy promo for our sports talk show, the Huddle. He had this elaborately storyboarded thing in mind about the little pig running through every room in the building.
Well.
The pig had something to say about that: namely, it wasn't going to cooperate with anything we wanted it to do. And it was going to choose rather haphazard places to pee. (In fairness, we didn't exactly establish any pig potty zones beforehand - it just wasn't something that had come up in staff meetings.) I was prone, at the time, to bringing a cheese log to snack on throughout the day (weird, I'll admit), and tried to calm the pig down by sharing some with it. Not only did the pig love it, it promptly fell asleep, kitten-like, in a patch of sunlight in the production office. So much for running all over the building.
Someone in the office had a miniature Arkansas Razorbacks helmet on his desk, so I grabbed that, stuck it next to the little pig, and took video of it sleeping. Then I wrote and recorded the little pig poem, reading it veeeeerrrrrry slooooooow so I could speed it up (Chipmunk style), and went home and recorded the Razorbacks fight song as a music box lullabye that night and dubbed it into the spot the next day. You can't say it wasn't cute.
This was the first spot on my reel for a couple of years, a fact which my next employers in Wisconsin never, ever let me forget. "Ha! We hired a guy from Arkansas whose reel starts out with a spot with a live pig!" Yes. Yes, you did.
Long before ESPN was doing it with off-the-wall SportsCenter promos, I was going a little bit crazy trying to make a sports talk show promo cute. The story behind this is... a bit strange. One of our sales guys told me he could borrow a neighbor's potbelly piglet, with the idea that we'd make some kind of crazy promo for our sports talk show, the Huddle. He had this elaborately storyboarded thing in mind about the little pig running through every room in the building.
Well.
The pig had something to say about that: namely, it wasn't going to cooperate with anything we wanted it to do. And it was going to choose rather haphazard places to pee. (In fairness, we didn't exactly establish any pig potty zones beforehand - it just wasn't something that had come up in staff meetings.) I was prone, at the time, to bringing a cheese log to snack on throughout the day (weird, I'll admit), and tried to calm the pig down by sharing some with it. Not only did the pig love it, it promptly fell asleep, kitten-like, in a patch of sunlight in the production office. So much for running all over the building.
Someone in the office had a miniature Arkansas Razorbacks helmet on his desk, so I grabbed that, stuck it next to the little pig, and took video of it sleeping. Then I wrote and recorded the little pig poem, reading it veeeeerrrrrry slooooooow so I could speed it up (Chipmunk style), and went home and recorded the Razorbacks fight song as a music box lullabye that night and dubbed it into the spot the next day. You can't say it wasn't cute.
This was the first spot on my reel for a couple of years, a fact which my next employers in Wisconsin never, ever let me forget. "Ha! We hired a guy from Arkansas whose reel starts out with a spot with a live pig!" Yes. Yes, you did.
