Baby, If You Ever Wondered

Please bear with a nerdy CALLOO CALLAY...WKRP in Cincinnati is out on DVD.

Nearly thirty years after the fact, Cincinnati's favorite radio station is still among the greatest television comedies ever broadcast. Part of the appeal lies in the fact that WKRP wasn't on the air long enough to get stale or become self-parodying. After 100 episodes, it was gone.

For the non-informed, it was the show Newsradio wanted to be, and more often than not approached for quality, despite the malign entity that is Andy Dick. For those who have an appreciation of the series in its original run on CBS, the only loss is the replacement of the original crappy seventies name-brand rock with generic crappy seventies-style instrumental cuts.

And Boooooger lives on in the collection. Somehow, Dr. Johnny Fever losing his gig in California for saying booger on the air seems quaint in the era of Don Imus referring to the Rutgers Women's Basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's." Indeed, Fever's second firing in California as a result of uttering a phrase commonly associated with being master of one's domain, in Seinfeld-speak, is absolutely archaic compared with Howard Stern's daily lesbian midget love fest on satellite radio.

Don Imus is no Johnny Fever. Johnny Fever had class, and style, and was not so self-absorbed as to believe himself to be a kingmaker and great wit. The voice of Johnny Fever was passionate about music, and confirmed in the faith that music and radio were an equalizer for the powerless and disenfranchised.

It was a cynicism rooted in a living memory of music pulling a humble trucker from Tupelo into the national spotlight. The trucker's fame came from combining the voices of disenfranchised people with a face that 1950s television could embrace. He empowered acceptance of a movement that no American, nowhere in America, should be deprived of any right, provided that said American lived up to the responsibilities that go with the privilege.

Fast forward thirty years to see Imus strip the dignity from the young ladies from Rutgers, upon a significant achievement in competition, and then go on the air with a bigger cretin, Reverend Al Sharpton, to seek his reconciliation.

On one hand, it was funny. Not funny in the way of WKRP but funny in an Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vein, to wit, an absurd premise with an entirely predictable script. One knew that Sharpton was not going to find pardon for Imus. Sharpton was watching Imus twist in the wind for the sheer diversion of it.

In seventies argot, they were two turkeys and it was Thanksgiving in April.

It seems a shame that no one tried to see if they could fly. Reverend Al Sharpton is not Venus Flytrap, either. He doesn't seem to share Venus' goldenly eloquent mastery of grammar and vocabulary. Venus persevered, where Sharpton requires bogus racism to achieve notoriety and justify his presence.

Suddenly, your Wandering Gentile feels waves of nostalgia for 1978. If pills won't cure it, the memory of how bad the cars were will.

There is a great feeling when reconnecting with art well made. Sometimes the art doesn't measure up- Miami Vice seems horribly stuck in its era when seen today, for example. But somtimes something endures and seems as fresh as the day it was made. Huckleberry Finn works 130 years later; Casablanca is great after 65 years; and happily, the words "as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly," hit just as well 29 years after they came across my black-and-white television in East Point, Georgia, for the first time.

What was an "Imus," anyway?