commercials

Chris Knight's avatar

Sheetz opened its first (and hopefully not last) location in Rockingham County this past week, located in Eden at Van Buren Road and Stadium Drive (it’s right next door to King’s Inn Pizza for those of y’all familiar with local geography). I paid my first visit to the new place today and was delighted to get another of their scrumptious Italian sandwiches. Up ’til now I’ve had to go to Greensboro or High Point for the nearest Sheetz. Now there’s one just 20 minutes away! And like all the other Sheetz stores it’s open 24 hours, 365 days a year.

So since this is about Sheetz, like the other two times I’ve posted on this blog about this company here’s that “Feel The Love” commercial that’s been running all summer…

And then there’s this other commercial from a few years ago for the chain, that shamelessly apes televangelism…

Anyhoo, if ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn’t it? šŸ˜›

SPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I’ve been invited to speak that Friday night about the very crazy situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running for a seat on Rockingham County’s Board of Education. Knight did not win a seat on the board, but he did win some internet and media fame as his commercial was featured in

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Holy cow!! Now I have seen everything.

Years ago there was a local television station called WGGT Channel 48, broadcasting from Greensboro. This was back when unaffiliated stations were extremely independent in their programming and such. Well, WGGT might have been one of the last to have what many people will fondly remember as a “horror host”: a home-grown character who presented various scary movies and sci-fi flicks on Saturday afternoons.

Except that WGGT did things a little different. It’s “horror” host was a goofy redneck named Billy Bobb, and his show was called Billy Bobb’s Action Theatre.

And believe it or not, someone somewhere has a trove of old recordings of Billy Bobb from WGGT and is now putting them on YouTube.

Here’s a set of promos for Billy Bobb’s Action Theatre…

And here are some commercials featuring Billy Bobb for area businesses…

I wonder whatever happened ...

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So in one week we have lost Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson… and now commercial pitchman extraordinaire Billy Mays, found dead this morning by his wife at their home in Florida.

Gonna miss him. It was always so easy to make fun of Billy Mays and that voice of his (which seemed to be a natural gift for his chosen profession) but let’s face it: the guy was very good at his job. He did his best to be a pitchman and in turn became something much more: a bona fide legitimate character in his own right.

Thoughts and prayers going out to his family today....

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(I just wish that it didn’t have to be followed up immediately by MTV running all of Michael Jackson’s classic music videos…)

As several folks have written in about: Tonight’s episode of MTV’s new show DJ & The Fro, titled “Birds”, featured a good-natured mocking of my “Star Wars”-inspired campaign commercial for Rockingham County Board of Education in 2006.

In the episode someone calling himself “Inbred Velcro Warrior” sends the Fro a link to the commercial. “In space, nobody can hear you scream” notes Fro as he and DJ cheer on the Death Star destroying the little red schoolhouse. Fro continues: “That’s also true for his mother’s basement, where this guy clearly lives!” DJ says “That’s the biggest loser in the desert since Moses!” I had some friends over to watch this (‘cuz the good folks at Titmouse Productions told me last week it would air this ...

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Earlier this evening the good folks at MTV sent along word that their new show DJ & The Fro will be premiering on June 15th (just less than two weeks from tonight). It’s a new animated show that in the words of its creators…

Deep in the soul-crushing cubicle maze of Oppercon Industries sit DJ & The Fro, two 20-something slackers who spend their days blowing off work while they find and mock the sickest and most hilarious videos ever to grace the Internet.

What Beavis & Butthead were to the music video generation, DJ & The Fro are to the YouTube generation. They find the best web videos and make jokes about them so you don’t have to.

When they’re not watching videos, DJ & Fro kill time by doing things like blackmailing pedophiles into doing their work for them, drinking the breast milk of a co-worker, stalking alpacas

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Three decades ago there was another swine flu scare. In retrospect, the government then over-reacted and a lot of folks who received the flu shot got sick from that. Some even died.

But I must admit: even knowing that, these public service announcements from 1976 about swine flu are darkly hilarious…

Thanks to Lee Shelton for finding these!...

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