A ‘Cheers’ Audience Member Concealed A Samurai Sword Etched With the Cast Member’s Names
Cheers is a bar where everybody knows your name. But one weird studio audience member wanted to make sure he didn’t forget, etching the names of cast members into the steel blade of a samurai sword.
Sound disturbing? John Ratzenberger, the actor who played know-it-all postman Cliff Clevin on Cheers, thought so too. He was the one who noticed something was off during a live taping of the sitcom, he said on a recent episode of the Still Here Hollywood podcast. “There was one audience member I remember just watching. I’m just looking at the audience as the show’s going on.”
Ratzenberger, who says he grew up in a tough town where you had to have eyes in the back of your head, believed this particular guy was giving off an ominous vibe. “He was looking at Shelley (Long) and Ted (Danson), just wherever they were, he was staring at them,” he remembered. “His eyes were just a little nuts.”
Don't Miss
Spidey-senses tingling, Ratzenberger noticed that the audience member’s eyes were fixed on Long and Danson, even when they were standing off to the side, away from the main action of the episode’s plot. Ratzenberger found Tom, the show’s head of security, and pointed out the suspicious character, asking, “Does this seem odd to you?”
Security Tom agreed, and his team made its way into the audience to check out the guy. They discovered that, under his clothes, the man had concealed “a samurai sword with, I think it was Ted and Shelley’s name written on it,” Ratzenberger said. “It was creepy.”
Security quickly escorted the man from the building, and that was the last Ratzenberger heard of it. “He just didn't seem right, just something’s wrong there,” he remembered. “That was nuts because it came so close.”
That wasn’t Ratzenberger’s only alarming encounter with a fan either. At a public market, “a woman grabbed my arm, and I was holding my son, a little baby,” he said. “She pulled my arm at the elbow. Well, now the baby’s fallen.”
Ratzenberger “was fast enough to catch (the baby) with the other arm,” he said. “But I laid into her and she said, ‘Well, I’m never gonna watch your show again!’ Okay. Fair enough. So you don’t watch my show ever again.”
It call comes with the territory of being famous, the Cheers star said. “This is the jungle you’re walking through. Now you got to figure it out.”
