I didn’t realize Bodett received residuals for work performed 40 years ago.
Will Motel Six still leave the light on for me?
I heard that phrase from my dad a decade before the commercials. I was driving home for the holiday and my dad always left the porch light on, and a lamp was on in the den.
It’s a simple courtesy that many families followed. No one likes driving up to a pitch dark house.
I was a producer on a local TV show back in the early 90s and booked him as a guest, I think because he was on tour for some book, though of course we talked about Motel 6. He was a nice guy, and good on him - $1.2M is a nice annual payday.
If you read that Reuters article closely, the issue (and why he sued) was that the hotel chain was still using his voice and narration on their reservation phone line, for which his contract with them (which ran through November) was supposed to be paying him. The article doesn’t state when Bodett had recorded things for their phone line, but I would suspect it’s much more recent than 40 years ago.
The ad campaign which used his voice started 40 years ago, but AIUI, it ran for decades, though there were, I think, times where they stopped using him, only to come back to him – and when that campaign was active, new ads (with new narration by Bodett) were created regularly. I believe that I’ve heard “new” Motel 6 ads, with Bodett’s narration, within the last 5 to 10 years.
Anyway, the lawsuit wasn’t over residuals for old ads; it was because Motel 6’s new owners were still using Bodett’s voice, without paying him what his contract with the chain said he was owed.
What surprises me the most in reading that story is that Bodett is “only” 70 years old – which means that, when he started doing Motel 6’s ads, he was only about 30, but he had a voice which made him seem and sound considerably older than that.
My WAG: the new, foreign owners of a budget hotel chain discovered that they had inherited a pretty expensive contract with a voiceover talent, which they decided they didn’t want to pay, but they got stupid about it.
!!! And here i opened the thread thinking, “is he still alive?”
My WAG is that they fired the person who knew about the contract when they routinely cut jobs to “save costs” and just kept using the same reservation system without even realizing there was a contract they were supposed to be paying.
…does fit well with @puzzlegal 's guess. The new owners failed to pay Bodett in January (but continued to use his voice), he finally filed suit in June, and in response, they (flailing and realizing that they had f***ed up) claimed that he was in breach of contract.
Random tangent: I just got home from visiting my family in Vermont. They live in Putney, two towns north of Brattleboro, which is where we were staying. In between them is Dummerston.
In idle curiosity, I pulled up the Wikipedia article on Dummerston, to find out that Tom Bodett settled there some years ago and for a time served on the selectboard. I found that randomly interesting.
Based on his IMDb entry, it doesn’t look like it. He has only two TV credits from the last 10 years: one episode of American Dad! in 2022, and archive sound in a Pokemon series from 2021.