Went to the Kwik-E-Mart, got on TV
Well, I lived up to the promise I made when I posted about the 7-Eleven + The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart promotion — I visited the Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD on 7/27/2007.
I almost didn’t get around to it, but I really wanted to go! Earlier in the month, I even tried to get my team, at work, to go as a combination weekly status meeting / team building exercise. But, I wasn’t able to get everyone on board with the plan. The main drawback was that it was over an hour away, under normal traffic conditions.
It was getting towards the end of the month, so Lacey and I drove up there with our 3 kids (Matthew, Skylar, Nikki), our friend Jena, and her son Xander. We didn’t even think about the fact that it happened to be opening day for The Simpsons Movie, until we were about half-way there. We were wondering if there would be anything special happening at the Kwik-E-Mart that day. As it turned out, there was…
When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures outside, then went in and took pictures of everything Simpsons-related that we saw. It was fun taking pictures of some of us standing next to the life-size Simpsons characters. There were lots of other people there, doing the exact same thing, too. It’s a good thing they had extra staff working during the Kwik-E-Mart promotion, because it enabled them to handle the high volume of customers pretty smoothly. We bought a few Squishees, half a dozen pink sprinkly donuts, and a bunch of hot dogs for lunch.
While we were taking pictures of everything, we ran across a man holding a large video camera, who was recording all kinds of things. We talked to him, at one point, and found out that he was recording video for Fox 5 News! He recorded us in several places, including Matthew and Xander getting their Squishees, Skylar and Nikki looking cute (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing), and me getting my 6 donuts out of the display case.
When we got home, I programmed the Tivo to record the 10 o’clock news, and the 11 o’clock news on Fox Channel 5. We actually watched the 10 o’clock news in realtime, hoping to see ourselves on TV. At around 10:55pm, they finally did a Simpsons segment, which was about 5 minutes long. We didn’t quite get the face time that I’d kinda hoped for, considering how much he actually recorded of us, but I know they had to condense their footage to fit within the 5 minute segment.
In any case, it was fun for us to see ourselves on the news on TV! I was looking into ways to get the video clip from my Tivo to my computer, but ended up finding it posted on the Fox 5 DC website. Woohoo! To watch it, yourself, see the links below.
Pictures:
Pictures from our trip to the Kwik-E-Mart
Video:
There are two ways to watch the Fox 5 News coverage of the Simpsons Movie opening/Kwik-E-Mart promo (in which we made brief appearances):
1. Download the 10MB .flv file to your computer (to view with your favorite media player application, if you’ve got the right codecs)
OR
2. View it in your web browser (from its original location, on myfoxdc.com)
If you look carefully, and especially if you pause at just the right moment, you can see all of us in this video clip. I have yet to find an easy way to extract just those frames from the .flv file, but hopefully I will get that done at some point.
Anyways, my hands getting donuts out of the display case, and my bright green shirt, can be seen at around 1:20 into the video (NOTE: if you’re watching it on the myfoxdc website, start timing *after* the horrible local advertisement).
From 1:27-1:31, you can see me, all 3 of my kids, Lacey, Jena, and Xander; we’re in the background, behind the kid who’s talking.
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