12/29/2023 0 Comments Gif machine gun guyBut Moschitta questioned his legitimacy from the start, arguing that there’s a big difference between fast babbling and fast talking: “You couldn’t understand a word he said.” Then, in 1990, British car salesman Steve Woodmore seemingly blew everyone out of the water, spewing 637 words a minute reading from the Tom Clancy novel Patriot Games. But for all the doors the Guinness record opened, Moschitta says, it also brought him years of unexpected strife, as a string of imitators attempted to steal his title.įirst, in the late ‘80s, there was New York comedian Fran Capo, whom Moschitta says “bamboozled herself into the book” by attempting her fast-reading of The Three Little Pigs during a live show “so that they didn’t have time to verify it.” Capo’s record was rescinded after her tape was reviewed, and Guinness gave Moschitta a chance to break his own record, which he did (ramping up to 586 words a minute from 583). That led to appearances on stupid-human-tricks-style reality shows like ABC’s That’s Incredible! and ultimately to the Micro Machines and FedEx spots. He nailed a recitation of “You Got Trouble” from The Music Man, a role he’d played growing up. His favorite, he says, launching into his signature Micro Machines voice, was, “She stood on the balcony inexplicably mimicking him, hiccuping and amicably welcoming him in.”īut it wasn’t until about ten years later, during a Guinness segment on the Columbus, Ohio, cable show in which he was working as a producer and performer, that Moschitta officially became the fastest talker on the planet. Young Moschitta locked himself in his room and drilled himself on tongue twisters. He thinks being from New York may have given him an edge, along with having five sisters in a boisterous Italian family in which you had to think fast to get a word in edgewise. The only thing I could really do that didn’t cost any money was fast talking.” “I decided I wasn’t going to eat a car or swallow lead pipe. “Looking back, I think I kind of rewired my brain to be able to do it.”Īt age 12, in his hometown of Uniondale, Long Island, Moschitta heard that anyone who broke a Guinness record would get his or her name on television in an annual cerebral-palsy telethon. “They didn’t know why mine didn’t,” he says. Its studies showed that most people could speak just 8 to 11 words at an accelerated rate before their “speech machinery” started to malfunction. At 583 words a minute, he was able to drop syllables five times as fast as the average person.īack in the ‘80s, Moschitta says, Bell Laboratories in New Jersey even wanted to test his brain. Moschitta’s rare talent for machine-gun speech earned him the nickname “Motormouth,” a Clio Award (for the FedEx spot), and a Guinness World Record for World’s Fastest Talker. “I blew up two of those and set three on fire,” he jokes. Long before Flo took her annoying throne at Progressive, Moschitta dominated the pre-DVR era, spitting slogans for FedEx, Minute Rice, Mattel, and Burger King so quickly that old-fashioned, paper-fed teleprompters couldn’t keep up. “The mother would be like, ‘I don’t know why she’s looking at you like that.’” “I used to get stared down by 1-year-olds in the supermarket,” Moschitta says. Testaverde, a teacher on Saved by the Bell, and popped up as a rapid “Letter of the Day” narrator on Sesame Street. He was also the voice of Blurr on the original Transformers cartoon, had a recurring role as the fast-talking Mr. Kids of the ‘80s don’t know his name, but they love him as the mustachioed “Micro Machines Man,” the guy who pitched the tiny toy planes, trains, and automobiles with superhuman speed in all those commercials. “People just come up and tell me, ‘You were my whole childhood,’” Moschitta tells New York by phone from Los Angeles. “Motormouth” John Moschitta in his Micro Machines pitchman heyday.
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