I don't like Alltel. I do like their marketing consultants though. They done good. The Chad vs. The Other Nerds campaign is one of my favorite commerical series these days. When it first started, the Sprint Kid (yellow shirt, in the back of that promotional photo) was the funniest (and the quietest -- it's always the quiet ones). Well, turns out, the Sprint Kid went to High School with me. His name is Mike Busch. He is one year older. I never knew him in high school, but when this was brought to my attention, I looked him up. He's in there.
He won me over when he threatened to beat Chad with a tube-sock full of wood screws. Not wooden screws. Wood screws. Those things are very pointy and made of metal. The thought of this relatively harmless kid threatening that extreme level of violence on someone over a cell phone is comedic genius... then, as if that weren't enough, when his nerd-buddies look at him in shock, he tires to justify it by saying his dad's a carpenter. Awesome.
Well, I'm not sure what happened after that. Maybe the wood-screws line was ad-libbed and someone at Alltel didn't like that. Maybe Mike's moving on to bigger and better things, but he's not the Sprint guy anymore. Now they've got some afro-totin' stoner fuck who doesn't have the same delivery that Mike had. It's depressing.
Since he dissappeared, I've been trying to find Mr. Busch on IMDB or TV.com. Turns out, I was spelling his name incorrectly (I thought it was Bush). My theory was that since he was no longer in the Alltel commercials, he was moving up the ladder and the next rung was either being the dead body or finding the dead body on Law & Order or CSI. Well, I was close.
He was a ghost on Ghost Whisperer.
So, maybe he is moving up in the world. I still expect to see him in something when the fall season starts up. He's already done a little bit, which I have not seen yet. See his resume here.
Mike, you made Alltel bearable. I'm sorry to see you leave that series. You would've made the wizard commercials even better.
2 comments:
Mr. Couch, teacher at Mentor High, is also a columnist in the News Herald. He has interviewed Mike and looked into why he left. Mike did not want to be typecast. He wants to do comedy and pursue other things. I miss him, too. The Alltel commercials are not the same without him.
I think all we Mentorites miss Mike very much. He is funny and subtle as you said. Now we have to throw our support behind those two young girls from Willoughby who are appearing on Nashville Star(just kidding)
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