By PETER LARSEN
The Orange County Register

Dr. Gadget likes his life. And really, what’s not to like?

He’s realized his boyhood dream – not the one about becoming a baseball player, the one about being on TV.

He’s just moved into a brand-new multi-million-dollar home in Ladera Ranch, which, if not quite a mansion, is certainly mansion-ish

And when he goes to work, everybody loves him. What’s not to love about a guy who gives away laptop computers or HD camcorders like the rest of us give away sticks of gum?

But – and the made-up nature of his name might have given you a hint – he wasn’t always Dr. Gadget.

Back on the farm in Ohio, he was just Dave – Dave Dettman, a kid who loved tinkering in the barn with his granddad, who had those dreams kids do (the baseball player, the TV star), and eventually figured out, or maybe stumbled onto, the secret that would transform him into Dr. Gadget.

But first, he had to become Mr. Product.

When we come back after the break, we’ll explain.

That kid in Ohio always woke early on Saturday mornings, so he could hang out with his inventor grandfather.

“I just worshipped everything he did,” Dettman says, reminiscing about days spent taking things apart and putting new things together, like the roto-tiller attachment the pair made and sold years ago.

“I was always the kid who would take my dad’s ear protectors, and take out the foam and run wires to it, and make my own headphones for my AM radio,” he says. “I always gravitated toward new stuff.”

Dettman came to California where he played baseball at Fullerton College before transferring back to an Ohio University, where he graduated with a degree in communications, journalism and theater.

When a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds didn’t pan out, Dettman took a shot at Hollywood. He worked as extra and took acting classes.

Then fate – in the form of a simple European toy – fell into his lap.
“There was a girl in my acting class, and her boyfriend was from Holland, and had found The Cube and asked me to get involved,” Detmann says.

The Happy Cube, as the toy was known, was a two-dimensional puzzle that turned into a three-dimensional cube. The small company that Dettman soon formed took The Happy Cube out to the toy trade shows – only to find that another company was selling an identical game.

Lawsuits and lawyers and debts soon followed. And, before long the Happy Cube was a sad memory. But Dettman had discovered he had a knack for business – specifically, figuring out how to get a product ready to sell. So he set about selling himself as a consultant to other fledgling companies.

He signed his first client – the inventor of a soccer-training device called the Star Kick – and helped get it ready to retail, eventually placing it on the QVC shopping channel where Detmann says he sold 67,000 of them.

Mr. Product – the name he gave his consulting firm – had arrived.

* * *

From a small office in Orange, Mr. Product eventually grew to a 50-employee company in Irvine.Still, the business wasn’t the dream that he’d always had. Mr. Product and his exuberant personality cried out for a larger stage.

The answer came to him on the red carpet at the music awards show in Los Angeles in 2001, where Dettman had gone to promote one of his client’s products, Stars in the Wild, a line of endangered animal dolls which had celebrities as their sponsors.

“I had the ‘N Sync White Tiger and all the stars were attracted to the plush white tigers – Mark McGrath, Marc Anthony, Christina Aguilera… All of them came up to the me on the red carpet and wanted to see them,” Dettman says.
“Mindy Burbano, KTLA’s entertainment reporter at the time, came up to me and said, ‘Who the heck are you?’ “I said, ‘I’m Dave – I’m Mr. Product!'”

Soon after, KTLA came to Irvine to shoot a story on Stars in the Wild. But they ended up getting a lot of footage of Dettman, too, doing his sales pitches on all the cool stuff that filled the company’s offices. A producer who saw the footage then invited Dettman to come to the station to talk about his stuff on the morning news show.

“I was nervous, but it was an excited nervous,” says Dettman, who showed up in a jacket covered in light-bulb designs – the Mr. Product logo. “But not scared to death. And confident.”

The next day, the producer called to say the ratings were great, could he come in again? For free?

“And I said, ‘I’m in!'”

Yet while Dettman was delighted, his business partners were not. Before long, Mr. Product, the man, quit Mr. Product the company.

“I told my wife what I was going to do, and bless her heart, she supported me,” Dettman says of his decision to go fulltime into TV product pitching. “She’d seen me do television, so there was so some level of confidence. But there was no guarantee of income.”

The television show “Survivor” gave him inspiration – and hope, he says. “I saw how they used product placement in it, and I thought, ‘I’m in the forefront of something,'” he says. “I said to myself, ‘If you’re right, introducing products on television could make me a living.'”

Unable to use the Mr. Product name any more, he gave himself an advanced degree.

“I thought, ‘If I’m a trusted expert on television, I need a hook,'” Dettman says. “And the hook for me was, if you go to the doctor, you trust the doctor’s opinion. So Dr. Gadget was born!”

* * *

From free segments for KTLA he added spots on Danny Bonaduce’s show at the time on Star 98 (KYSR-FM/98.7). He brought in new products, too, like George Foreman grills. And he gave them away to listeners. That led to Bonaduce helping Dettman hook up with “The Other Half” – sort of a guys’ version of “The View.”

To find products, Dettman hit the trade shows, asking manufacturers if they’d like to get their products – TVs, cameras, household devices and so forth – on “The Other Half.”

They did. And they were happy to pay Dettman to do it, particularly if he’d talk about their stuff on the show, as well as consult with them on how to get their products into the public eye in other ways, too, he says.

From “The Other Half” he moved to “The Wayne Brady Show.” When that ended, “The Tony Danza Show” made him a regular – a popular regular thanks to a decision made soon after Oprah decided to start giving away cars and other goodies to her studio audience.

“On the day Oprah gave away cars, the producer called me and said, ‘Doc, give away everything you have on the show. Everybody gets one,'” Dettman says. It was a ratings hit – “There’s an ‘I wish I was there’ sentiment,'” he explains. Soon, anytime word got out that Dettman was coming on the Danza show, lines would form around the block.

“The thing got crazy,” he says, “I was like Santa Claus.”

When the Danza Show ended, Dettman was at loose ends for only a short time before one of Rosie O’Donnell’s producers called to see if he’d be interested in coming on “The View” which, after Oprah, is one of the most successful of the daytime talk shows.

“I remember when I got that call,” he says. “I remember jumping up and screaming, and telling my wife, ‘I got “The View!”

He debuted in December 2006 – smack in the middle of the ratings-boosting Rosie versus Donald Trump trash-talk-athon. Since then, he’s returned every five or six weeks, each time giving away loads of goodies to everyone in the audience.

“The Montel Williams Show” also uses him as its product guy. Dettman appears Friday on the show that airs from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on KTTV-TV/11.

And Dettman now is in talks to develop a show of his own and turn his Web site – www.doctorgadget.com– into a shopping site, too.

“It’s a game show I wrote called ‘Everybody Gets One,’ a cross between ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ and ‘Truth or Consequences’.”

If that happens, expect the house he shares with wife Marti and kids Brooke, 14, and Noah, 9, to get a little more crowded with even more gadgets.

“My entire life is surrounded,” Dettman says, “by the thing I do.”