Paul Rudd Says He Almost Chose 'Baby Geniuses' Instead Of 'Mac And Me' For His Long-Running Conan O'Brien Show Prank

Actor Paul Rudd has been pranking talk show host Conan O'Brien with the same clip for 15 years, always pretending as if he's about to show a real clip from the project he's ostensibly there to promote, only to actually show a truly ridiculous snippet from the 1988 film Mac and Me. There's no reasoning behind it – Rudd just thinks it's funny, and he's totally right about that – but the actor recently revealed that in those early days, he was initially considering using a clip from the film Baby Geniuses instead. 

Rudd recently joined O'Brien on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast, where he explains how he played with the idea of choosing a clip from a movie that came out more than a decade later: Bob Clark's 1999 family comedy Baby Geniuses:

"Another one that I'd been toying with was from the movie Baby Geniuses. I don't know if you've seen the movie Baby Geniuses, but Baby Geniuses is another one of those movies that you watch and say, 'Who was this made for?' I don't even know what the target audience is! Essentially, all babies know the secrets of the universe and can talk to one another before they turn two, before they forget it, and as they start to talk, it goes away...

There's a scene where a baby – I wanna say they have this super-baby in a lab? I don't know – and he escapes, and this team of thugs are trying to track him down, trying to get this baby. And then they cut to this baby fighting a group of men, and it's clearly a stunt little person just beating up these guys. And I assume the budget was so low that there was this one maniacal laugh that the kid makes, and every time in the movie, they just use the same laugh. You hear it a hundred times."

I could not find the specific clip online that Rudd was talking about, but it looks like a segment of that fight scene appears in the movie's trailer:

This looks like a solid backup choice, but I think Rudd made the right decision by selecting a blatant E.T. ripoff that was reportedly funded by McDonald's, includes Ronald McDonald as a character, and features a dance scene that is literally set inside one of their restaurants. (Oh yeah, and the main child character dies in the movie. He's brought back to life, but still!)