To many of you, this will be old news, but to some of you who may not have seen this program on the American Heroes Chanel called "Secrets of the Arsenal", we invite you to take about 12 minutes and enjoy an episode from their premiere program. This first showed sometime in December of 2014. I know it been rebroadcast at least 50 times because every time it gets shown again, I receive phone calls and emails.
Here is a little background. I was contacted by one of their producers in the Spring of 2014 because they had visited my website and wanted to know if I had any real cool artifacts with stories behind them. Well, needless to say, I told them they had come to the right place and offered a sampling of items I had that might fall into that category. The one they selected was my very special pistol retrieved from the famous U-505 when this submarine was captured on June 4th, 1944.
A few months later, after about 20 forms, terms and conditions and other paper work had been signed, a date was set and a crew of six showed up at my door-step. The group consisted of two camera men, a sound man, two producers and the host of the program. The final product is about 12 minutes long but they were at my “toyroom” for about 12 hours. There were many takes and retakes (mostly because the host kept flubbing his lines and he was a perfectionist) and things were shot from many different angles. We had to rearrange some of the fixtures and artifacts but essentially the shoot went very smoothly.
In one scene where I tell the host he has to put on gloves, I stated "if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit". Everybody laughed but the producers made us shoot that scene over. They also had me remove a movie marque from "Saving Private Ryan" because they were nervous about that. Instead, I gave one of the crew an American flag to put up. Unfortunately, I never checked as he put it up backwards. That was the only negative feedback we got from the 1000s of people who contacted me after they saw the episode.
I asked them to run a logo along the bottom of the screen showing The Ruptured Duck website address. As I was to receive no compensation for the appearance, I thought this would be a good way to promote the business. The producer said they couldn't do that but he said that wouldn't be necessary because people will find you. He was correct as I got a few dozen leads and was able to buy some nice
stuff as a result.
WATCH THE EPISODE HERE
Overall, I was very happy with the final product but they only touched on the background story. Stay tuned and next week, I'll tell you "the rest of the story"!
