http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/nyregion/the-public-face-of-crazy-eddie-recalls-the-real-one.html 2016-09-13 05:13:09 The Public Face of Crazy Eddie Recalls the Real One Jerry Carroll, the high-energy pitchman for the electronics chain, was often confused for one of its founders. He wasn’t, but he knew the man who was. === There was the time that inspiration for a radio commercial struck as Jerry Carroll was walking down Third Avenue. He explained it to the advertising executive he was with, who said, “Sounds like a good idea.” They stopped for a moment, just long enough for Mr. Carroll to write out the commercial, using the top of a trash can as a desk. Now that was insa-a-a-a-ane. Mr. Carroll was the high-energy, high-volume pitchman in There was a real Eddie — In all, Mr. Carroll appeared in more than 7,500 commercials on radio and television that were sly attention-getters. He dressed as Santa in winter and again in summer (after Mr. Antar dreamed up “Christmas in August”). He put on a beard and a stovepipe hat, and a moment later, a white wig to “honor three great Americans — Lincoln, Washington and Crazy Eddie.” He flew like Superman, “who, disguised as this annoying television announcer, fights a never-ending battle for service, selection and prices that are insa-a-a-ane,” as the voice-over bellowed in one commercial. “A lot of people, for a long time, thought I was Eddie,” Mr. Carroll said on Monday. “I never wanted that. To me, I was always Jerry and he was always Eddie.” And when the chain imploded in a tangle of debt and fraud after flying high in the 1980s, “it didn’t do any good,” he said. People said things. Nasty things. He is vague now on exactly what, but they were stronger than “how could you?” Mr. Antar and two brothers were accused of skimming cash from the company. The chief financial officer, Sam E. Antar, a cousin, pleaded guilty to fraud and testified against In the 1970s, Mr. Carroll was working as Dr. Jerry — “prescribing your rock ’n’ roll!” — at WPIX-FM, and one of the sponsors whose commercials he was assigned to read was then a mere one-store operation. (Mr. Antar had already changed the name to Crazy Eddie, from the less distinctive Sights and Sounds. By one account, Mr. Antar’s first wife met someone who raved about the great buys he got at Sights and Sounds from a “Crazy Eddie.”) “He heard me reading the live copy,” Mr. Carroll recalled on Monday, “and he said, ‘I wish all my commercials could sound like that.’ Somebody said: ‘Well, they can. Why don’t you seek out Dr. Jerry.’” That led to a handshake deal to do Crazy Eddie’s commercials. “Eddie was a lot more than people probably thought he was,” Mr. Carroll said. “You could talk about anything from religion to philosophy with Eddie. He was interested in it all. He was a good guy to sit at a bar and have a drink with.” And when he was on the set when the commercials were being videotaped, his nit-picking could be as exasperating as the character Mr. Carroll was playing. “If Eddie was with us, Eddie always had something better to add after we got the shoot done,” Mr. Carroll said. “‘If you change the “a” to a “the,” we can make this work.’ The best of times was, he was always fun to work with. The worst of times was, he could take a four-hour shoot and turn it into an eight-hour shoot by changing articles and prepositions.” Harry Spero, who was in charge of Crazy Eddie’s advertising from 1979 on (and who Mr. Carroll remembered as the advertising executive with him when he stopped to write the commercial on the garbage can), said it was always a challenge to prepare the ads. “All I had to do was figure out how to cram 120 seconds’ worth of copy into a one-minute spot,” he said. “I hate to use the cliché of lightning in a bottle,” Mr. Spero said, but that was what the Crazy Eddie commercials were. “Nobody has been able to touch the magic that we captured,” he said. “I’ve spent my entire life since Crazy Eddie trying to duplicate that.” Mr. Carroll said he never saw Dan Aykroyd’s parody on “ “I was doing what I was doing, and I was happy with it,” he said. Larry Weiss, who helped create the commercials early on, wrote in 2005 that the slogan Mr. Carroll made famous was a revision. “I initially proposed ending the spots with the line ‘Crazy Eddie — the man is insane!’ Eddie actually took personal offense at this. We eventually settled on ‘Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane.’” Mr. Carroll also said “insa-a-a-ane” might have been written out more or less that way from the beginning, at WPIX-FM. So how many A’s were in insa-a-a-ane? “There was never just a solitary A,” Mr. Carroll said. “If you were running short on time, you only added a few. If you had time, you could go on forever.”