Nearly 50 Years Later, WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Radio Station
openculture.com78 points by bookofjoe 4 days ago
78 points by bookofjoe 4 days ago
Radio Retrofit took all the station breaks and song announcements from the show, combined them with the full length songs to create around 6 hours of WKRP radio. 3 hours of Johnny Fever and 3 hours of Venus Flytrap. MP3 downloads available.
Really a brilliant idea.
Johnny: https://www.awphooey.com/wkrp
I can’t wait until Thanksgiving.
I was thinking of this episode the other day and wondering how it could have stuck with all of us independently after all these years given that there was no social media / meme sharing back then.
As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
They can, but they don't gain altitude so good. I had one fly across the road at top-of-windshield level. Since I figured it would just clear or just glance off, I did nothing to avoid it.
Unfortunately, I had a roof rack on. Fortunately, I was able to find replacement parts for the rack on eBay.
The turkey didn't appear to be harmed. After tumbling ass over teakettle to the ground, it walked into the field on the side of the road looking for all the world like a cat that wanted you to forget you'd just seen it do something beneath its dignity.
The absolute favorite activity of my dog is to chase groups of turkeys that are in our yard. She’s only 15 pounds (and 15 years old now) and has never caught one, but I think being in the middle of a group of 20 turkeys all desperately trying to fly up to trees quickly is quite the experience for her.
She’s never caught one, even the younger ones. It seems like they can actually fly easier than the adults.
Turkeys are one of the animals in that general category that, knowing what we know now, you look at them and you're like "How could smart scientists not look at them and not see that they are obviously a form of dinosaur?"
Even their footprints look like a dinosaur track
It's almost worse that, if you go back a ways, a lot of the theories were that extinction was fairly incremental--even comet/meteor notwithstanding. So, given essentially total extinction, convergent evolution may not have been a bad theory and may not even have been totally wrong.
The idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs is nearly as old as evolution itself, first being proposed by Thomas Huxley in 1868 (Origin of the Species dates from 1859).
The only reason there was a competing evolutionary theory is because it was erroneously thought that birds have a clavicle and dinosaurs don't, so instead it was proposed that birds and dinosaurs have a common ancestor, and that dinosaurs lost the clavicle. Now that they have excavated many more bones paleontologists have since discovered therapod clavicles.
like wet sacks of cement...
I always wondered if there was a relationship between this and the Oregon exploding whale in 1970 ? https://www.google.com/search?q=whale+explosion+oregon
Evidently it's from a true story. Luckily not actually thrown from a helicopter!
https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/turkeys-aw...
CLARKE BROWN: The turkey drop was actually a real incident. ... Although the turkeys were thrown off the back of a truck, as opposed to how it was depicted on the [show].
This is wonderful. I grew up watching WKRP and wanted to be Doctor Johnny Fever when I grew up. Managed to work in radio for a few years part-time, but by then DJing was “here’s a program sheet. Play these songs, exactly” - not the dream of being a DJ doing their own programming. I also realized why Johnny was always broke.
Still, very cool, and a little jealous of the on-air staff that get to work there.
It's a bummer that the show will never play with original music on some streaming service due to (as I understand it) music licensing problems.
The most horrible example is the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Early commercial VHS tapes of it have the original music. Later tapes, and the DVDs, have all the music replaced with just awful generic music. That bad music just makes it unwatchable.
Music is an enormous factor in movies, I wonder why nobody mentions it. For example, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is spectacular and adds greatly to the pleasure in watching it. In contrast, the soundtrack to The Hobbit sounds completely generic and boring, and the result is unwatchable.
Another example is Star Wars. The first two movies had amazingly good soundtracks. The later sequels had boring music, and whaddya know, the sequels were boring.
I don’t know if perfect soundtracks would save your examples; I’d argue that the malaise infects everything: you can’t make a great soundtrack for a mediocre movie.
> you can’t make a great soundtrack for a mediocre movie.
I'm having trouble coming up with an example, but my dad told me that "Warsaw Concerto" was composed for the movie "Dangerous Moonlight". The movie was bad, but was popular because people really liked "Warsaw Concerto".
I think an amazing song or piece could come from or certainly be used in a crappy movie, but I don’t think you can have a definitive entire soundtrack for a bad movie.
I could probably be proved wrong( I don’t think it’s entirely causal but more “they won’t pay for good music if they won’t pay for a good script” kind of thing.
The "Warsaw Concerto" was composed for the movie. I haven't seen the movie myself, but movies often use themes from the main song throughout.
Xanadu was a terrible movie, but the soundtrack was a critical and commercial success -- it went to number one in 11 countries, was certified double platinum in the US and had six charting singles, some of which still get radio airplay over four decades later. (And all the songs on the soundtrack were written for the movie; it wasn't a collection of already-existing pop songs.)
The solution there is to not bother with "streaming services" and just download the readily available alternative captures, which include the original music.
Northern Exposure had similar problems but, as I understand it, at least some was resolved for the (somewhat relatively) recent DVD box set release.
It just wasn't an issue that was seriously considered by a lot of studios(?) at the time and it's not like back catalog TV shows are usually these big money-makers that warrant a lot of time and cost to get in order.
That's so stupid when these rights disputes come up! Think of how many people will stream or buy the songs legally after (re) discovering them on an old show.
And think of how few people will watch the show solely because it features copyright music.
It should be the other way around, i.e. Stranger Things should send the record company a bill for the resurgence of "Running up that hill".
Shout out to Bailey Quarters. I'm still waiting for your call.
I was always going to name my daughter Bailey after Bailey Quarters. But I never had a daughter, and my wife wouldn't let me name our son that. So the dog got the name.
Will Les Nessman be in his "office"?
We had a shared office at one point with three of us with desks. One guy was absolutely ANAL about nobody touching his stuff or approaching him unannounced.
So we taped off the area around his desk and started calling him Les. He was like 22 and had no idea what that was about, but he liked the nickname. It's decades later and he still goes by Les. Love it.
That's funny, especially since the callsign was part of the humor of the show.
Funny, I didn't watch this show much but was well aware of it as a kid, maybe it went over my head. And like many things introduced as a kid, I never thought to consider what KRP was supposed to mean. But I did just now, cheers.
Meta: I'm still learning new things about the 70s and 80s.
They even had a parody of a reality show in "Real Families." This was in 1980.
There's a scene where Herb is talking his family up as he attempts to casually throw a football with his kid. It quickly becomes obvious Herb has never played with his son, who makes no attempt to catch the ball and just keeps getting hit with it.
Ooh, it's even better than I remembered-- Herb steals his son's stuffed animal from him to get him to play catch:
I think it went over a lot our heads at the time…
The conceit of the show (pilot episode) was that the station had been a staid and lame radio station (out of Cincinnati) that suddenly came under new ownership (I think?). The staff now get to build a new (and cooler) brand for the station and there are no longer any guardrails.
Man, a bygone era where TV theme songs were an art in itself.
I think I'm getting this show mixed up with another. I thought that Phil Hartman was in it but looking at the wiki page he's not listed... ah, Phil Hartman was in News Radio. WKRP was almost 20 years earlier. Everyone that watched it is probably dead or in a nursing home.
The last episode of WKRP was 44 years ago. What age do you believe people die or go into a nursing home?
I saw it in passing as a kid. It was clearly for adults, so by now, yes most are either in nursing homes or at least senior living communities.
I was a pre-teen when it came out and I loved it. We all used to watch it as a family.
Reruns were on for a long time after that. I remember the show fondly even though I was 8 when it ended.
Thanks for the chuckle. But a lot of us are hanging on for dear life, and still living independently.
There was also two seasons of 'the new wkrp' from ten years after the old one. I don't follow the show (either version), so I don't know if the new seasons are any good; or the old ones really, but there'a a following, obviously.
I watched it. I am not dead, in a nursing home, nor retired.
I watched and (apprently!) still know the entire theme song, which is wild because they stopped making new episodes when I was a toddler. Must have been in reruns; I wonder if it was that after school / pre-dinner time slice when we watched Happy Days and 321 Contact?
Single-question aptitude test: choose one
a. dead
b. in a nursing home
c. retired
d. one of the above
e. none of the above
One of the actors of the show recorded promos for the station, so guess not.
The fact that someone posted a link to the article that you probably didn’t read also refutes this premise.