As God is my witness...

If you aren't completing the second half of the above line in your head, maybe chuckling to yourself, it's entirely possible you don't watch enough TV to read this blog. To be fair, that phrase has been used many times, in many contexts, but to certain die-hard television fans it can only mean the set-up to the final punchline from the legendary "Turkeys Away" Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. It's the episode in which Mr. Carlson stages a disastrous holiday promo by having live turkeys hurled out of a helicopter above a shopping center's parking lot. In Mr. Carlson's immortal words: "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

It's the funniest moment in one of the funniest half hours ever to air on the small screen. And fans of the show (myself obviously included) have just gotten a bit of good news -- the "news of the century," as Logan, only slightly exaggerating, calls it in the comments to my last post. We will soon be able to own that episode on DVD. The first season set of WKRP is scheduled for release in April, 2007.

I have long bemoaned the fact that exhorbitant music licensing fees made a DVD release of WKRP all but an impossibility. And, truth be told, it's still technically an impossibility: some of the music from the original episodes will be replaced. Apparently, Fox has taken special care to replace whatever music they couldn't afford with the least jarringly inappropriate substitutes. But the fact remains that the original, unaltered episodes will in all likelihood never receive an official DVD release.

Oh well. I guess I'll have to take what I can get -- and trust me, it's plenty enough to have me walking on air. I never thought WKRP would get the DVD treatment in any form. This is a pop culture dream come true. I can't wait for April!