A friend and I were chatting online. He mentioned an actor and couldn’t place him, and I realized he meant an actor on WKRP in Cincinnati.
For whatever reason, as soon as I typed WKRP, I got it.
I really, really hope I’m not the last person on the planet to figure that out.
Figure what out? Their mascot was a carp.
I loved that episode where the carp got into a fight with the other mascot.
The WPIG Pig. Yes, that was good.
Now, radio station KOME in San Francisco… that’s a different story.
“Don’t touch that dial; you’ve got KOME on it!” **
** Actual radio ad
I dunno. Wanna go bowling?
Wasn’t there an episode where an employee from a competing station said it stood for CRAP? Maybe the one about the softball game. My memory is faded about it.
Call letters are so random I never made that association. In looking at the wiki and on the net there are a few people asking the same question but I don’t see any verifiable evidence this was the sub text intent of the call letters.
Wasn’t it supposed to have originally been a station that specialized in agricultural news? In that case, the KRP could have been for “crop”.
I’ve never known whether it was intentional or not, but since I became aware of the show, it’s always been W-CRAP in my mind. That said, I’ve never seen the carp episode.
Well, Mad Magazine’s parody of the show ran back in October 1980 and was titled WKRAP in Cincinnati, so it’s not like you guys are Columbus, here.
[sub]Get it? Cincinnati, Columbus…[/sub]
That was what my mom always called it.
Yeah, but Lonnie Anderson…
Those swine!
Loni was amazing, but I was a Jan Smithers (Bailey Quarters) fan myself. She was one of my first TV crushes.
I always ALWAYS thought WKRP stood for W-Krap.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
I seem to recall when they introduced the Carp one character (Bailey?) asked another (Johnnie?) “What does KRP spell?” The look on the other characters face clearly showed he was thinking “Crap?” until she says “A Carp!”
I thought they were “… the KOME spot on your radio dial”
San Jose.
“I’m a giant carp, Andy!”
“I know you are, Herb.”
Funny thing about that episode (called “Fish Story”). It was written by series creator Hugh Wilson, though it’s credited to the pseudonym Raoul Plager. Wilson was getting demands from the network to add more physical comedy and general “wackiness” to the show. He wrote “Fish Story” to be deliberately as ridiculous, over-the-top, and dumbed-down as possible, in the belief that it would demonstrate how those sort of hijinks just didn’t work for WKRP. He was confident that the audience would utterly reject that kind of “cheap, low-brow” comedy.
To his horror, the episode was a huge hit, and has become a fan favorite. To this day, he continues to hate it.