POCphil and POCmerritt on Cleveland’s That’s Life with Robin Swoboda. Could two people be more charismatic ambassadors of scooterdom? Throw in POCrenee and you’ve got a hit reality show, one that I get to watch live, every time he’s around. People accuse me of being a Phil Waters groupie, but Phil’s met African-American preachers, racist skinheads, models, racing superstars, cops, soccer moms, hillbilly gun nuts, Tom Jones, and even my parents, and charmed the pants off of all of them, often literally. Who could blame me for loving the guy, his wife, and everything they stand for?
Note that even the best scooter dealers tend to bend the truth a little (Genuine Buddies start around $1999, but that’s a top-of-the-line Black Jack) but props to Phil for drilling home the safe-and-legal message right from the start.
In our defense the shows producers wanted us to stress the “affordability” of the thing. The topic of the show was stay-cations…(a failure based catch-phrase I’m sick of) which is a hard reality in Cleveland where unemployment is nearly double the national average. Their original intent was to do an outside shoot and to have the talent and studio audience riding the scooters. We were able to talk them out of that after I showed them the Chicago 7 crash footage on my Iphone. We were told to stress the low prices, fuel efficiency and ease of operation. I consider it a huge leap I was able to make as many points on safety and licensing. That’s the bitch about TV guys…you can say what YOU want, they’re gonna run what THEY want. Missing is the entire second half of the interview where we do wheelies and smoky burnouts in the studio and Merritt gets ’em out for the boys.
Awesome video Phil and Merritt and thanks for posting it up Bryan! I too have had my pants charmed off of me by Phil :)