WICHITA — More than two years ago, ABC offered Wichita affiliate KAKE, Channel 10, the opportunity for characters from the hugely popular “Lost” to create promos for the station.
The “Lost” promos themselves became lost, but now have been found — and in a big way. Here’s what happened:
KAKE marketing director Bryan Frye and producer Tim Boknecht — big “Lost” fans themselves — sent some pretty standard promo scripts to ABC.
Then Frye thought of an idea for the character Hurley, who likes to eat.
“Man, how funny would it be if we could get him to do, ‘Mmmm, KAKE.’ ”
Not only did Hurley do it, but so did characters Juliet, Sun and Ben.
“We’re like, this is hilarious,” Frye says.
Boknecht strung the four clips together and posted them to his MySpace page.
The promos didn’t appear on KAKE, though, because the station couldn’t use them before “Lost” went on hiatus.
By the time the show was back on, the tapes were forgotten.
“I know,” Frye says. “Believe me. . . . I’m embarrassed that we forgot that we had them. We just got sidetracked with other projects.”
Then, last week, someone in Russia found Boknecht’s MySpace page and posted the videos as her own.
By the time KAKE knew anything, the Russian already had 230,000 page views.
Frye believes the clips were found and viewed so much because ABC had a contest for “Lost” fans to make their own promos.
Boknecht told the Russian to take the video down, but by then it had gone viral.
Tina Brown’s Daily Beast Web site even posted something on it.
“The funny thing is, most people don’t know it’s KAKE they’re saying,” Frye says.
“You’ve also got to understand the mind-set of the ‘Lost’ fan,” he says. “The producers are notorious for putting red herrings, misleading videos, clues — you know, all sorts of tricks to make you think it’s going one way and then it goes the other.”
So he believes fans are wondering if KAKE — or “cake” — is a clue of some sort.
Frye has even written a publicity person at ABC to ask if perhaps Hurley can utter, “Mmmm, KAKE,” in a future episode.
“That would really just make this great.”
Regardless of whether that long shot happens, Frye says the station is “just having a blast with it.”
The actors seemed to have fun shooting the promos, too. Frye says they probably thought it was bizarre to be saying, “Mmmm, KAKE.”
“You can tell that they’re a little bemused by it.”
Finally, KAKE will begin running the promos, two and a half years late.
Look for the first one during “Lost” Tuesday.
Even without KAKE running the clips, they’ve clearly already gotten a lot of attention.
“It’s just been worldwide,” Frye says. “It’s just a simple little piece of video, but it’s just the power of the Internet.”