Matt Lauer on His Pamela Anderson Baywatch Costume: I Looked Like "Dee Snider With Fake Boobs"

Today host tells Ellen worst part of Halloween look was wearing a "testicle vice"

Before Matt Lauer put on that iconic Baywatch swimsuit for Today's Halloween special, we had no idea what great legs he had!

But, if you ask him, he didn't quite pull off the sexy lifeguard look. "It was supposed to be a tribute to Pamela Anderson," he said on an episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show airing Wednesday, Nov. 13. "I look more like Dee Snider with fake boobs!"

"It's not a great look," he admitted. But Ellen disagreed, telling him, "You look good! You have great legs."

"You look surprisingly good in a swimsuit," she pointed out, to which Matt responded, "Too good, right?"

Nonsense! Matt, 55, knew Carmen Electra, a legitimate Baywatch alum, would be seeing him doing his best C.J. Parker impersonation, and he did his best to prepare. "I was working out. I didn't want her to show me up in that red suit," he quipped. "So for about a month I was doing crunches and man, does she look fabulous."

Hey, Matt held his own! Ellen reassured him that he didn't "offend" Pamela with his costume, telling him once again, "You looked really good!"

But to be fair, Matt had a lot of help pulling off his Baywatch look. "We have a team," he said. "It's like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. I mean, I sit in the chair. We've got the Today show wardrobe people. We have Saturday Night Live people. We've got prosthetic people, so what I do is I sit in the chair and I've got people buzzing around me. I've got one person doing make-up, one person doing hair, another applying the appendages. And, then I don't look in the mirror until the transformation is complete because I want to be surprised. And, I was surprised."

It only took "about 30 minutes" for Matt to go from journalist to Baywatch beauty, but he said "the hardest part is putting on the device." Meaning? "The device that um, it's called a concealer is what it is," he explained. "If they use the name that's more appropriate—if described it like, 'It's a testicle vice,' then I probably wouldn't have used it."

Matt went on to describe how this concealer (aka the testicle vice) was put into place. "You get naked," he said. "So I'm in the dressing room and I get naked and then you put this thing on. I've never put Spanx on but I would imagine it's sort of Spanx times ten. And it's intentionally 20 sizes too small."

That sounds…unpleasant. Fortunately, though, Matt survived, and in his own words, "I've had my kids though, I'm all right."

(E! and Today are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)