Silvio Santos - Snake In Bananas At The Supermarket

Silvio Santos - Snake In Bananas At The Supermarket
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Silvio Santos - Snake In The Supermarket
Picture: A frightened housewife screams on seeing a snake hidden in bananas.


The above video was copied from SBT television of Brazil. SBT Television is owned by Silvio Santos, whose real name is Senor Abravanel.

Silvio Santos is a Sephardi Jew, born to a Greek father and a Turkish mother in the city of Rio de Janeiro on December 12th 1930. (Sephardi Jews loosely means Jews originally from the Spanish/Portuguese Iberian Peninsula region before their expulsion in the late 15th century.) His parents, Alberto and Rebecca Abranavel, were immigrants to Brazil. Silvio was originally meant to be called Dom. But when his parents went to register his name, it was not accepted. Dom is the Brazilian Portuguese synonym for Mister (Mr.) So his father registered him as Senor. But his mother never came to accept calling him Senor, and instead would call him Silvio, the name by which he is now recognized.

Silvio Santos
Silvio Santos
Silvio Santos founded SBT Television in 1981, and even today in 2011, thirty years later, Silvio Santos continues to host programs such as Camera Escondida(Hidden Camera), the show that first transmitted a version of this video clip.

Silivio Santos is known to hold various business interests, not only in television, but in agriculture-related businesses as well as the hotel industry. It is reported that Silvio Santos is the single-largest private-individual taxpayer in Brazil. Various estimates of Silvio Santos' wealth put the value of his holdings at between $US1.6 billion US and $US 3.2 billion as of 2011.

All has not been well for Silvio Santos' SBT Television, which is facing falling viewership in a large part due to the same challenges facing Television in North America - the emergence of the Internet as a source of information and entertainment.

Commercial television in Brazil began in 1950, on par with the commercialization of Television in the United States. Television in Brazil became a mass medium with the support of the former military Government, which was trying to create a unique Brazilian identity, and subsidized the buying of television sets by the public, and built microwave and satellite tranmission systems as enabling infrastructures.

Whereas the military was involved in censoring News material, the Government was not involved in ownership of any stations, and there was virtually no state regulation, and all ownership was done by the private sector - the first Government station in Brazil was only launched in December 2007.

One of the two biggest Television stations in Brazil in 1980, Tupi, went bankrupt and was closed. Its signals were split between two parties and one was given to Silivio Santos for use in SBT Television programming. Silvio Santos already hosted his own shows on Tupi, and the bankruptcy of Tupi gave Silvio Santos an opportunity to become an outright owner of a Television station.

Silvio Santos' SBT was for several years Brazil's second largest television station until recently being surpassed in viewership by Rede Record. Silvio Santos' SBT survived coexisting with its larger competitor, Rede Globo, by targeting the lower middle class, the working class, the less privileged sectors of the public, and teenagers and young adults. Surviving has been no mean feat, given that Rede Globo has more than 340 television stations, more that Silvio Santos' SBT and Rede Record combined. (Rede Globo is in fact the World's 4th largest Television Network.)

However, neither Rede Globo nor Silvio Santos' SBT were prepared for the onslaught as a result of the emergence of the Internet. It is being reported that surveys conducted by recognized accounting and marketing firms such as Deloitte suggest that the Internet has overtaken Television as Brazilians primary source of entertainment and News.

This should not be surprising. From the time that television was commercialized in Brazil in 1950 to the emergence of the Internet, even though all Television ownership was in the private sector, News was censorsed by the then Military Government. Rede Globo, being the preferred partner for the then Military Government, generally did not publish items critical of policies being enacted. When Silvio Santos' SBT Television station was offered a signal, it concentrated on entertainment and did not provide much in terms of News or general information.

With the arrival of Google's Orkut as a social media platform, for the first time ever, Brazilians had the opportunity to self express themselves to the rest of the world and to their fellow Brazilians. They no longer had to depend on Rede Globo, a defacto monopoly, for their News or to express opinions about what was going on round them. Brazilians quickly came to dominate Orkut, and are believed to make up approximately 70% of Orkut's registered users to date-a remarkable achievement given that it is suggested that only a fraction of Brazilians have access to the Internet.

Orkut allows users to publicly share items they find interesting on what is called a scrap, the equivalent of a wall on Facebook, and a stream in Google Plus One. The result was that Brazilians-rich and poor alike, were freely able to use the power of cheap technology to communicate their ideas with the rest of the world. Whereas Silvio Santos's SBT entertainment programs remain relatively popular, the fact that millions of Brazilians could choose content for themselves rather than depend on the few hundred or so employees that Silvio Santos' SBT has meant that interesting items could be much more quickly identified. So much so that Silvio Santos' SBT has in fact been turning to social media such as YouTube to see what Brazilians are posting, and then highlighting them on their Brazilian SBT shows. Brazilians tend to popularize their videos through their Orkut profiles. Silvio Santos' SBT will often invite the owners of popular video clips to provide an inside glimpse into the lives of the people behind the videos.

Silvios Santos' SBT may have weathered the emergence of the Internet much better than other television stations in Brazil, in particular Rede Globo. Though Rede Globo remains the world's fourth largest television network, it is rumoured that it has not made a profit in over five years, mainly as a result of declining viewership. Silvio Santos' SBT may be better placed than Rede Globo to withstand the Internet onslaught. Apart from the fact that Silivio Santos deliberately targeted younger audiences long before the emergence of the Internet, many of the shows hosted by Silvios Santos are already created in a format that is compatible with the current social media structures such as YouTube. In Camera Escondida(Hidden Camera) for example, a short clip, usually approximately three minutes in length, will attempt to poke fun at people by, for example, scaring them, etc, and filming their reactions which are later shown on TV. They are normally referred to as Silivio Santos' pegadinhas. What this means is that people wishing to share pranks transmitted on Silvio Santos' SBT simply have to tape the short clip and upload to YouTube.

As a result, many people outside Brazil who had previously never heard of Silvio Santos or SBT now actively search for "Silvio Santos Pegadinha" videos on YouTube. Some of Silvio Santos' videos that you may be already be familar with are a skeleton riding a motorcycle by a graveyard, and a skeleton driving a car asking bystanders for directions. Many YouTube users may not realize that these videos are from Silvio Santos' shows in Brazil because even people who are not from Brazil will copy the videos and post them on their channels. Sometimes a video, even without words, is quite funny-something that Silvio Santos appears to be an expert at creating.

Other television networks in Brazil tend to host News, Politics and soap operas, which as still appreciated by the older generation, but are a hard sell to the younger generation. These formats are not quite compatible with the present Social Media formats, which tend to favour short clips, normally less than ten minutes in length. This puts them more at risk of falling to the onslaught of the Internet than Silvio Santos' SBT.

Another reason why Silvio Santos' SBT may be better placed to weather the Internet onslaught is a phenomenon that has been observed in younger audiences, and for which Google, YouTube and other social media platforms are having a hard time dealing with - competing to have the most friends and competing to have the most views on a video. This has resulted in YouTube having to implement mechanisms to verify the number of visitors to a video when there is a sudden viewership rise - the famous stop count at 300 for example, and other anti-automated viewership detection mechanisms.

Younger audiences will actively search for interesting content to post on their profiles, and Silvio Santos' pegadinhas are extremely popular for this purpose. For those who have noticed, YouTube has recently added a "Remix" button on some videos, probably as a result of taking note of this behaviour in the younger audience. By giving young audiences and opportunity to play with videos, YouTube manages to increase the "stickiness" of its site - the length of time the people spend visiting its site. This is considered an important factor when advertisers are considering where to advertise and how much to advertise.

Silvio Santos may indirectly be benefiting from this phenomenon in the younger audience. When the younger audience compete to have the most number of visitors possible watching a video, and when they choose to use Silvio Santos' material, they may inadvertently both increase the viewership for "Silvio Santos Pegadinha" shows and promote him to an even wider audience. It is not uncommon to find several copies of the same pegadinha on YouTube, sometimes remixed to some extent. Surprisingly, several copies of exactly the same video have over a few thousand views, which might indicate that Silvio Santos's pegadinha shows on TV are getting free promotion via the younger audience as they compete to show off that they have the highest number of visitors to their sites.

The video clip on this page is an example of a Silvio Santos pegadinha. Relatively harmless young anacondas or boa constrictors have been hidden in bananas in the grocery section of a store. Unlucky housewives get to be heard screaming on Silvio Santos' show when they lift the bananas to examine them and a snake's head pops out. It takes a lot of self control in a person not to laugh when the person hears the housewives screaming with all their might when they get a fright.

An interesting anecdote about Silvio Santos' first marriage was that for for twenty years he hid his wife from the public. While at first glance this might seem odd, apparently there was a time when it was not socially acceptable for Television hosts in Brazil to be married. Strangely, it was not a male dominance issue, but the female audience who refused to accept male Television hosts who were married. Silvio Santos' wife, Aparecida Abranavel, apparently took this in stride as an artistic necessity for the success of Silvio Santos' career. A biographer states that Silvio Santos became devasted at her death in 1977 as a result of cancer. Silvio Santos remarried in 1978 to his current wife, Iris Abravanel.

Silvio Santos is a descendant of Dom Isaac Ben Judah, sometimes also referred to as Yitzchak ben Yehuda Abravanel ((hebrew: יצחק בן יהודה אברבנאל), a Philosopher and Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) Commentator. The Abravanel family is one of the oldest Serphadic Jewish families, and has direct roots to Biblical King David.

Thank you for watching.

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