nicksmith March 2, 2009 Entertainment 21 views Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Many people were saddened to hear Conan O’Brien was stepping down from his after midnight show that he hosted for 15 years. Some were outraged to see that Saturday Night Live funny man Jimmy Fallon was named to be his successor. If you look back, the choice of O’Brien to take over for the legendary David Letterman was not welcomed with open arms by all back in 2003 either. But here we are a decade and a half later and the changing of the guard begins tonight on NBC.

Armed with The Roots as his house band and a new website, Jimmy Fallon plans to come out of the gates running. He previewed his thoughts on gaming in technology in a recent interview:

“We’re going to treat a video game premiere as if it was a movie
premiere. My generation grew up with the computer. We grew up with the
Internet. We live in a video game type of world – video games are
second nature to us. Games make more money, as an industry, than the
film industry.”

“I’m interested in tech, and I’m interested in
gadgets. I want tech people to come on my show, whether it’s Bill Gates
or the guy who designed the new Palm Pre, to talk about new inventions.
I want to know what makes it so great. I want to see new video cameras.
I want to see new technology. And I think that’ll be interesting to
people who are awake at 12:30 at night. We’ll have great bands. We’ll
book great guests. I hear we got the ShamWow guy. That’s good.”

Jimmy Fallon claims that the only real competition with his show is “sleep” since it is on so late, but I will throw out video games as competition too for many of us. I am anxious to see how his debut goes tonight and to see whether tech/gaming is a big part of his show from the get go or not. I think he will do fine and I hope he delivers a show that sounds like it is meant for “us”. The first show is tonight at 12:35am EST so be sure to set your DVR or TIVO if you can’t hang that late. Jimmy’s site warns that your Conan settings won’t carry over either.