#david ruprecht

Are you looking for a low-stakes, low-brain, low-commitment show? Have you ever wished you could just sweep an entire shelf of items into your cart at the grocery store? Have you ever looked at your supermarket, full of people and noises and time you’d rather spend doing something else, and thought, I should get paid for putting up with this?

GOOD NEWS

Supermarket Sweep is fun. It is silly. It’s the perfect game show because you, viewer, watching from your couch ~27 years after broadcast, without the pressure of an audience and cameras, are certain to know almost all the answers. (Grocery stores and brands have changed surprisingly little since the 90s.)

The premise is simple: three 2-person teams compete by answering trivia about nationally-branded products, guessing which items in a set cost more/less than X, and other easy-to-do-from-your-couch games to win extra seconds on their clock. At the end, the teams race around the market, using however much time they’ve built up to throw as many products into their carts as possible, the prize going to whoever manages to accumulate items with the highest combined total. For reference, a low score would be $500 (adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $900 in 2020).

Get the imported cheese, Becky!

That’s it. And it’s so, so fun. Do I want to drive my cart at breakneck speeds around supermarket corners, throwing products in left and right and get paid for it? Yes.

A secondary layer of enjoyment comes from the fact that the collection on Netflix starts with episodes from 1993, and hooo boy those outfits and hairstyles. I love them.

There’s a time skip and later episodes are from 2000, which was a trip for me because suddenly everyone was wearing styles I actually remember wearing (or coveting, or thinking was cool). Suddenly: sleek hair! skinny tight shirts! brown lipstick!

Also there’s a married couple who met online and the sheepish way they admit it, and the stunned speechlessness of the host at the entire idea of meeting on the internet, is a fun reminder of how weird that used to be. Like, you’d think they admitted to meeting after running away to the circus or something.

(Actually, the couple says they have 5 children so assuming no multiples and they’re not a blended family, that means they met no later than 1994/1995, which is pretty impressive.)

Also, the behind-the-scenes of this is fascinating, and the host (David Ruprecht) is quite amiable. The announcer is also the announcer (currently) for Jeopardy, which is just a very nice game show voice.

Verdict

Fashion? (Normally I’d discuss voices here, but this is a live game show so…) In the first episode there’s a woman with big permed hair and high-waisted brightly-colored shorts with a large flowery print, and also a woman with a vest that looks like it’s made out of airport carpet, and a mullet. 10/10

Visuals: Suddenly you find yourself in a supermarket in 1994, wearing a patterned sweatshirt tucked into light-wash high-waisted jeans. Fluorescent lights show you a world dominated by primary colors and flattened logos and fonts. The person ahead of you in line looks younger than you but dresses like your dad. Macadamia nuts cost exactly the same.

Worth watching? I do not know how to make this any clearer: yes.

Where to watch (USA, as of August 2020): a 15-episode collection spanning the early 90s-2000 is on Netflix. Maybe if everyone watches it, they’ll add more? (Some episodes from 1991 and 2000 are also on Prime Video.)

Shoppers Gone Wild

Mercy Christmas (USA, 2017)

‘Dinner is served’

Mercy Christmas is a 2017 horror film directed by Ryan Nelson from a screenplay co-written with Beth Levy Nelson. The No Mercy Pictures-Other Paw Films production stars Casey O’Keefe, Gwen Van Dam and David Ruprecht. 

When Michael Briskett meets the perfect woman, his ideal Christmas dream comes true when she invites him to her family’s holiday celebration. Dreams shattered,…