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.
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.
vibrio 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t wait until Thanksgiving.
PyWoody 7 hours ago [-]
As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
mauvehaus 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Auracle 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
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?"
grosswait 1 hours ago [-]
Even their footprints look like a dinosaur track
ghaff 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
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].
wiremine 4 hours ago [-]
Oh thank you, I came here to make that joke. Great show.
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pwg 3 hours ago [-]
The solution there is to not bother with "streaming services" and just download the readily available alternative captures, which include the original music.
justbees 3 hours ago [-]
There's a DVD box set that has almost all of the original music!
tanseydavid 1 hours ago [-]
Shout out to Bailey Quarters. I'm still waiting for your call.
noefingway 5 hours ago [-]
Will Les Nessman be in his "office"?
Loughla 3 hours ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 5 hours ago [-]
That's funny, especially since the callsign was part of the humor of the show.
mixmastamyk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jancsika 53 minutes ago [-]
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:
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.
comrade1234 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bityard 5 hours ago [-]
The last episode of WKRP was 44 years ago. What age do you believe people die or go into a nursing home?
paulryanrogers 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 5 hours ago [-]
Reruns were on for a long time after that. I remember the show fondly even though I was 8 when it ended.
toast0 4 hours ago [-]
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.
quantummagic 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the chuckle. But a lot of us are hanging on for dear life, and still living independently.
alsobrsp 6 hours ago [-]
I watched it. I am not dead, in a nursing home, nor retired.
skeeter2020 6 hours ago [-]
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?
bookofjoe 6 hours ago [-]
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
mixdup 6 hours ago [-]
Calm down with the questions, he's not the President
bookofjoe 6 hours ago [-]
Where's my Xanax...
jzb 52 minutes ago [-]
Um. I grew up watching WKRP. I’m in my mid-50s.
kmbfjr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 18:18:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Really a brilliant idea.
Johnny: https://www.awphooey.com/wkrp
Venus: https://www.awphooey.com/venus
Still, very cool, and a little jealous of the on-air staff that get to work there.
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.
She’s never caught one, even the younger ones. It seems like they can actually fly easier than the adults.
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].
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.
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.
Meta: I'm still learning new things about the 70s and 80s.
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:
https://youtu.be/1Tk6NpIncXg?t=444
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.
a. dead
b. in a nursing home
c. retired
d. one of the above
e. none of the above
The fact that someone posted a link to the article that you probably didn’t read also refutes this premise.