We Finally Know Why Bob Saget Voiced Older Ted On HIMYM
At its surface, "How I Met Your Mother" is the rare television program that answers exactly as many questions as it asks. How did Ted Mosby meet his kids' mother? Easy: He went to a wedding and hit it off with a ukulele player. After that, it was just a matter of waiting for nature to complete its majestic cycle, bringing forth new Mosbys and disposing of old wives via the glorious circle of life, opening the door for Ted to hook up with his friend's ex wife. That's almost a decade of primetime comedy, condensed into less than a paragraph.
Still, not every riddle posed by the series had the good fortune of being tied up neatly at the end of its run. At face value, one of the more perplexing aspects of "How I Met Your Mother" was the way that Josh Radnor's Ted Mosby sounded eerily similar to Bob Saget in his narration-heavy later years. Was this the work of some sort of futuristic autotune? Was Ted involved in a Brundlefly-adjacent accident in the 2020s and genetically fused with the star of "Full House?" Fan theories zipped across the internet. Probably. The internet's a big place.
Anyway, Bob Saget finally addressed the issue in a recent interview with Alabama Life & Culture. Man, we can't be the only ones that are sick to death of Alabama Life & Culture getting all the good scoops.
Time did strange things to Ted Mosby's voice and hair
Bob Saget recalled the process of being offered the gig, narrating "How I Met Your Mother" as the older, unseen Ted Mosby. "I was doing a play in New York, an off Broadway play. And I get a call from Pam Fryman, who was one of the exec producers of "How I Met Your Mother." She also was the director. And she's just one of the best people I know. I knew her from my kids' school because her daughters are my daughters' friends. She called and said, 'Look, we think you'd be right to be the voice Josh Radnor.'"
At that point, Saget asked the same question that fans have wondered about for years: "And I said, 'Why doesn't (Josh Radnor) do it?,' which everybody's been asking since. And the reason was, they just wanted him to sound older, and people knew my voice, it was a familiar voice."
The gag worked. A "Wonder Years"-style separation between an adult Ted Mosby and an even older Ted Mosby gave the show a solid hook, and differentiated the narration from the episodes proper. In retrospect, it also seems worth mentioning that having Radnor voice the narrator might have blurred the line between him and Zach Braff too much, causing them to become a single entity made of lovelorn network comedy ennui, acoustic guitar songs, and pomade. It was probably mostly the "familiar voice" thing that Saget brought up, though.