A Roggin’s Gallery of Oddball Items : Television: The KNBC sportscaster has a hit with his nationally syndicated ‘Roggin’s Heroes.’

When Fred Roggin shows bloopers and blunders during his sports segment on KNBC Channel 4’s newscasts, he gets away with not paying for them because he’s working on a news show.

But when he shows the same clips on “Roggin’s Heroes,” his nationally syndicated weekly series that has little to do with sports and absolutely nothing to do with news, paying for the rights to air them is only part of the problem. Finding out just who he has to pay is the tricky part.

For example, after using a clip of a daredevil who jumps over cars while on roller skates, Roggin’s executive producer, Phil Olsman, received a call from a guy named “Tricky,” who demanded to be paid. Olsman checked it out and discovered that Tricky was the daredevil in the tape and that “Roggin’s Heroes” couldn’t appropriate his act without paying for it. So he called back to negotiate a deal and discovered that Tricky was in jail.

“I call up and the guy answers, ‘Correctional Officer So-and-So, and you’re talking to Prisoner No. 389765,’ ” Olsman said. “Tricky was in the Big House, and he’s saying, ‘If you can get me the money, I can get out of the slammer.’ He wanted $2,500, but we bargained him down to $1,000.”

Whiplash, a monkey who rides the back of a bucking dog, was also involved in a threatened suit. “I have signed releases from people who sold me the material, but the truth is they don’t own it,” Olsman said. “Whiplash wasn’t cheap. Whiplash wasn’t in jail.”

“During the first few weeks the show aired,” Roggin added, “if we got through to 5 p.m. and we hadn’t been sued, everybody in the office would stand up and cheer.”

The fast-talking sports anchor, who rose to the top of Los Angeles sports reporting with his silly clips and even sillier promotional campaigns, is cheering today at all times of the day. Not only is he still the top-rated sports anchor in town--for which KNBC pays him an annual salary of about $750,000--but “Roggin’s Heroes,” the first show produced by his company for MCA, is surviving the national ratings wars and has been picked up for another 26 installments.

The show, which premiered in January and currently plays in 170 markets across the country, has been averaging between a 4 and 5 rating nationwide, or about 4 million homes each week. That national average, however, is dragged down considerably by the fact that in some markets, the show airs in the wee hours of the night. In Philadelphia, for example, the country’s fourth-largest TV market, “Roggin’s Heroes” airs at 3 a.m.

In cities where it airs at 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, such as Los Angeles, or when played after the local news on Sunday nights, as in Dallas and San Antonio, it often registers double-digit ratings. One night in February, when war coverage played havoc with network TV schedules, “Roggin’s Heroes” ended up the top-rated show on any station in Los Angeles.

Why such attention for a show that in its first 17 installments has combined the embarrassing sports gaffes and zany stunts made famous in Roggin’s “Hall of Shame” news segment with such “America’s Funniest Home Videos” stuff as a toddler with a toilet seat stuck on his head and a man playing the piano with his nose?

“In the midst of trying times, people have a tendency to look for escapism,” Olsman said. “For a half an hour at the end of the week in 1991, we give them mindless entertainment. They don’t have to do anything except sit there. You don’t have to follow along. In many cases you don’t have to even listen. You just watch the clip and laugh.”

The show is taped before an audience with Roggin, dressed in a tuxedo, providing commentary for the video. Roggin defines the content of the program as “real-life comedy, which basically means everything fits in this show.”

The show fires clip after clip at the viewer--a waiter lights his hair on fire, Muhammad Ali boxes an elephant, a group of people slug back tequila shots and scream at the top of their lungs, a daredevil slams into a wall and bursts into flames, a frog bench presses a tiny barbell. The idea is that if you don’t like this clip, wait two seconds for the next.

Even though local viewers know Roggin, 34, solely as a sportscaster, “Roggin’s Heroes” is no “plays--or even follies--of the week” kind of program. And because each show is designed to be repeated again and again in the years to come, clips from 30 years ago are as good as those taped yesterday.

“If we were just doing sports, we would not have the success we are having,” Roggin said. “Given that the smallest percentage of TV news viewers watch for the sports, we would have limited our audience too much. That wouldn’t help us bring in women. That wouldn’t help us get the little kids.”

Olsman concedes that the show is a “derivative” of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” but it is much broader in its focus. The show’s staff scours the globe searching for funny clips and clip libraries. They solicit video from their affiliate stations and have exhausted Roggin’s own library, built up during his more than 10 years at KNBC. “Roggin’s Heroes” also sets clips to music and parodies of popular songs to punch up the video.

Purchasing the clips and the rights to songs, Roggin said, is “astronomically expensive.” Video often costs in excess of $2,000 per minute, and a few seconds of a song can run upward of $3,000. He uses an Australian agent to buy foreign libraries of bloopers from Europe because, he said, sellers double the price as soon as they find out a Hollywood company wants to do business.

“ ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ taught people that this stuff is valuable,” Olsman said. “Before that, people used to want to be on TV. They’d send stuff and say, ‘Put me on TV.’ Now it’s, ‘Put me on TV and send me $2,000 and another 10% for my lawyer.’ ”

Roggin, who joined KNBC in 1980, said he has always dreamed of owning his own production company. He formed Jennon Productions--a name derived by combining the names of his 3-year-old twins, Jeffrey and Shannon--last year, and with Olsman’s help, the company is looking to produce additional TV shows, such as game shows, other reality or sports programs, multivenue live concerts, perhaps even a sitcom.

Somewhere down the road, if his company puts several series on the air, Roggin said he might consider giving up his day (and night) job at KNBC. But even though he has been working a 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. schedule to anchor the sports at Channel 4 and produce his syndicated project--he rarely leaves the office to cover sporting events on site--he insists he won’t be leaving the news any time soon.

“I really enjoy the challenge of producing and running a company, but if it wasn’t for Channel 4, there wouldn’t be any Jennon Productions or ‘Roggin’s Heroes,’ ” Roggin said. “When my current deal expires in a few years, if my boss (KNBC General Manager John Rohrbeck) still wants me, and I hope he does, you’ll still see me doing the sports on Channel 4.”