As a marketing ploy that was a tribute to a classic “WKRP in Cincinnati” TV sitcom episode, White Castle had a helicopter drop turkey sliders toward 15 customers/targets in West Chester, Ohio on Friday.

There were no reports of mass hysteria in southwest Ohio so the marketing plot did not equal the calamity of the live-turkey drop orchestrated by WKRP management in the TV episode. Turkeys plopped onto the mythical Pinedale Shopping Mall with disastrous results for the birds. An oven would have been a kinder fate. Car windshields were smashed. People scrambled for cover.

And Johnny Fever announced after Les Nessman’s frantic descriptions: “Pinedale Shopping Mall has just been bombed with live turkeys.”

Flustered station owner Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson sputtered one of the all-time classic TV sitcom lines: “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Gordon Jump, in real life, once had been a Dayton, Ohio radio personality.

It was one of the most hilarious TV sitcom episodes I’ve ever watched in my life. “WKRP,” for you youngsters, was about a mythical Cincinnati radio station that barely survived with a bumbling station owner whose overbearing mama put him in charge. It aired in 1978-1982.

The cast included buxom, in every sense of the word, Loni Anderson as the secretary who overwhelmed the testosterone gender and won her two Emmy nominations and eventually a marriage to Burt Reynolds; Dayton native Gary Sandy as Andy Travis; Dayton native Gordon Jump as Arthur Carlson, put in charge by his mother, who later regained fame as the lonely Magtag repairman in TV commercials; Oregon native Howard Hesseman as the drug-loving DJ Johnny Fever, who later starred in the classic 1984 movie, “This Is Spinal Tap”; Harrisburg native Richard Sanders as the wannabe famous newsman Les Nessman; Little Rock native Frank Bonner as Herb Tarlek, who had an Arkansas Razorbacks coffee mug on his desk in the series and was married and divorced four times (must have been the outrageous suits he wore on the show); Norfolk native Tim Reid as Venus Flytrap, the cool black guy who in real life with wife Daphne Reid performs in the Hollywood Black Movie Festival; and Jan Smithers, born in the Woodland Hills section of the San Fernando Valley in California and married to and divorced from James Brolin, as Bailey Quarters.

You can watch the classic scene by clicking on

http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/11/27/watch-the-classic-turkey-drop-scene-from-wkrp-in-cincinnati/