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Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Great Moments in 70s and 80s TV History: Gary Sandy introduces a special WKRP rerun

One of the most famous sitcoms episode is the 1978 WKRP in Cincinnati Thanksgiving installment titled Turkeys Away. What fascinates me is this clip of series star Gary Sandy introducing a repeat of it in December 1980:




I don't remember many reruns getting this kind of special treatment back then. Sandy talks about the big reaction the original broadcast got, so I guess CBS figured this rebroadcast would get good numbers.

Personally I'd like to see every rerun get a special intro like this.  "Hi. I'm Grant Goodeve. When we first broadcast this episode of Eight Is Enough, we didn't anticipate the dozens of cards and letters we received talking about the Who's on First routine performed by Dick and Nicholas."

I also think it's funny that Sandy jokes about showing a Thanksgiving episode several weeks after the holiday. Hey, if they can do that, we can run this post months before the holiday. It's really this intro, though, not the episode itself, that excites me.

(As it happens, November 27 was Thanksgiving in 1980, and CBS ran a new The Waltons, while the preceding and the following Saturday each saw a new WKRP, or so I think. I am unable to confirm the airdate reported by the YouTube poster as December 13, 1980, and in fact, I saw an indication that a different episode aired that evening. )

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