Matt said he'd never wear a Snuggie, but...
Posted: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 8:50 AM by Jen Brown
From Mike Celizic, TODAYshow.com
He said he “wouldn’t be caught dead in a Snuggie.” Yet a frigid Wednesday morning in New York found Matt Lauer sitting on the couch wrapped in the latest sensation that’s sweeping America.
“I’m having chest pains as we speak,” the TODAY co-host joked after watching the clip of himself declaring his intention never to get wrapped up in a blanket with sleeves.
Click here to watch the segment.Lauer was wearing a bright blue Snuggie. His TODAY partner in blankets-with-arms, Meredith Vieira, sat next to him in a red Snuggie, while Al Rocker and Natalie Morales flanked them in Snuggies of their own...
Recording it all was the TODAY stage crew – also draped in Snuggies and looking, as Lauer noted, like a gospel choir...
Since Snuggie commercials started blanketing the airwaves, both the ads and the garment have taken on a cult status. Some four million have been sold, and the campy infomercial has inspired some 300 YouTube parodies (including
The Cult of Snuggie),
according to USA Today. There are even Snuggie
fan pages and discussion groups on Facebook.
The
ubiquitous TV ad seems to come straight from the 50s, with happy people snuggling in their La-Z-Boys, cheering at sporting events or curling up on the couch, looking very much like monks in their party robes.
The late-night comics are having a ball with it. Just a few minutes before the TODAY crew donned their Snuggies, a report on the California octuplets filed by NBC News’ Michael Okwu included a clip of Jay Leno joking that no one knew the babies’ mother was pregnant – “she was wearing a Snuggie.”
Following Okwu’s report, Joann Killeen, a spokeswoman for Nadya Suleman, the babies’ mother, spoke with Vieira from an NBC studio in Los Angeles. A Snuggie commercial was playing on a small television monitor on a desk behind her.
Vieira admitted that before she tried one on, “I used to think, ‘What a goofy thing.’ But it’s not so goofy…They’re warm.”
“This is the toastiest I’ve been in here,” said Morales, basking in her own reflected warmth inside her Snuggie.
Snuggies are offered for $19.95 each – with a second one thrown in free – plus shipping and handling. But there’s a limit of two per customer, supposedly because of limited supplies.
“If you’re giving them away, of course there’s a shortage,” Lauer said.
While everyone agreed that Snuggies do, as advertised, keep the wearer toasty warm, Lauer noted that, “There is not one thing found in nature in this fabric.”
Roker pointed out that a picture on the Snuggie box shows a family wrapped in the backwards robes happily toasting marshmallows around a fire. “You get too close, you’re going up,” he opined.
After a break for local news, Vieira and Lauer were into their overcoats and out on a frigid Rockefeller Plaza to talk to fans and introduce the 8 a.m. hour.
“It’s cold out here today,” Lauer said. “We need our Snuggies.”
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