image via the Kelly Manno Show
Last month, St. Louis podcaster Kelly Manno did something that only a truly sympathetic spouse could sign off on: She spent $400 on a pair of inflatable dinosaur costumes.
But what Manno did next made it all worthwhile: She managed to video-bomb local TV news crews on three different occasions.
The footage is priceless. In one live shot, filmed at a Target, Manno and her tyrannosaurus partner-in-crime can even be seen pushing each other in shopping carts while Fox-2's Katherine Hessel does her live segment. "Right now there's not a lot of people out doing errands because it's late," Hessel says, as the dinosaurs prance by doing their shopping. (They also make a second appearance later in the KTVI clip, so keep watching past that initial cameo.)
Another Dino-bombing success! Those who watched behind the scenes on Facebook live can tell you....getting in and out of a shopping cart in an inflated Dinosaur costume is not easy....I have bruises big thanks to my buddy and guest co-host Rob Cutler for being my Dino brother!
Posted by Kelly Manno on Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Hessel, to her credit, never loses her cool. But that's more than can be said for KMOV (Channel 4), which Manno says apparently issued a memo late last week informing crews of the dino problem — and telling them to shut down production STAT if they encountered the besuited pranksters.
The catalyst for the memo was a live shot on Wednesday night featuring reporter Alexis Zotos, Manno says. "The cameraman lost his mind," she reports. After the shot, she says, "He came and argued with me in a dinosaur costume for ten minutes — and we were live streaming the whole thing on Facebook."
Here you go! Dino-bomb #4 - if you were watching the live stream behind the scenes you know how hard we had to work for this quick cameo
Posted by Kelly Manno on Wednesday, February 17, 2016
(Of Zotos, Manno adds, "We'll keep the dinosaurs away from her going forward. But actually I think my cohost —" Tim Melton, known to local radio fans as Addison Clark on "the Steve and DC Morning Show — "has a crush on her.")
A radio veteran herself, Manno made headlines last month after crowd-funding a campaign to send Stan Kroenke a few boxes of shit. Her "Dino Week" schtick sprung from genuinely missing the whacky stunts of "morning zoo radio." She says, "I didn't realize no one was doing stuff like this anymore until I started my own show."
Manno has friends in local media. But that's not how she and Melton managed to interrupt so many live shots. They did that easily enough by keeping an eye on reporters' Twitter feeds and watching the 9 p.m. news, since they've found so many shots are repeated an hour later at 10.
After the KMOV memo, Manno decided to finish off Dino Week last Thursday night with a stunt that didn't involve broadcast news. "We didn't want to legit get in a fight with TV reporters," she says. "So instead we went to Wal-Mart to see how long it would take them to kick us out."
Oddly, Wal-Mart had no problem with the cavorting tyrannosauruses. "Wal-Mart gave zero shits," Manno reports. "We stayed there an hour and then we got bored and left. The people who worked there were like, 'We do not get paid enough to deal with these assholes.'"
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