Meet the guys from Westport who bring back all our childhood memories
Everyone likes to take a trip down memory lane once in a while, but two guys from Westport have made nostalgia their calling card with their burgeoning media empire.
Frankie Frain and Jon “Junt” Hunt have lived in Westport all their lives and discovered all that the SouthCoast had to offer in the 1980s and 1990s, like shopping at Ann & Hope, seeing a movie at Cinema 140 or have a bite to eat at the round of land.
Growing up, they both worked in independent films and eventually combined their production skills and close friendship to form Red Cow Entertainment about six years ago and create a YouTube channel which to this day has a little more. of 16,000 subscribers and continues to grow.
“We started doing our flagship ‘BoxMac’ series, which is a web series where we decided to try and review every macaroni and cheese, and we get them from all over the world – Germany, Scotland, everywhere,” said Frain said.
They also cover video game reviews, pop culture, and a series where Hunt takes the viewer to various retail establishments and shows off his purchases titled “What’s in Junt’s Cart?”
“Junt is like a bargain hunter, he loves bargains and he has a very particular way of shopping,” Frain said. “We started with KMart because it was aging in the old mall in Fall River, and then we did Black Friday videos, and it was obvious that he really liked the aging retail, the dead malls, the Building 19, that sort of thing.”
“RIP Restaurants and Retail”
This led to a series called “RIP Restaurants and Retail”, in which Frain and Hunt stand outside the places they remember visiting growing up – some abandoned, some repurposed – and share their memories of this place and discuss what may be there now.
“We started looking for that, and before you know it, we’ve been watched by people across the country and around the world,” Frain said. “Everyone has retail and restaurant memorabilia.”
Dartmouth, New Bedford and other featured South Coast restaurants
Their videos of restaurants like Dartmouth’s Old Country Buffet and Seekonk’s East Side Mario’s are hugely successful, but what’s important to Frain is that they also share more than individual memories; they also share the story of their friendship.
“We’ve been friends for a really long time, and some of the memories we share are also the ones we made together, which adds to the fun,” he said.
Frain said it gets really interesting when they find out that some of the long-gone places around the south coast can still thrive elsewhere.
“East Side Mario’s closed years ago, but we’ve seen they’re still going strong in Canada. We had no idea,” he said.
Improving the production game
Due to Red Cow Entertainment’s production experience, they are able to create highly produced clips that incorporate other elements beyond Frain and Hunt standing outside with a microphone.
“The fun thing is you can really tell half the story of these places through old clips and old commercials, and that’s what makes them accessible even beyond the public. of SouthCoast,” he said.
Our own Fun 107 team even integrated some of the videos. In a recent edit discussing Dartmouth Red Lobster, Smokey Bones and other places that used to be where the Brazilian Grill is now, they cut a clip of Michael Rock and Gazelle eating rodizio meats.
In the video on Old Country Buffet, Gazelle makes an appearance again, alongside this writer, in a clip we created after OCB closed for good in 2016.
“We have new ones coming soon,” Frain said. “We just released one on Newport Creamery in New Bedford, and we have one coming on the old Radio Shack in New Bedford. It was great to revisit old Radio Shack commercials from the 90s, the ones we hadn’t thought of in decades and talk about things like the Tandy line of computers.
Remembering a simpler time
“The restaurant culture in the 80s and 90s was very different from today,” Frain said. “Going to a family restaurant was maybe a twice a year thing. We didn’t go there every Friday night so our relationship with the restaurants and the food was different.
Keep what works
Red Cow Entertainment tries to post a video to YouTube about once a week, and while they also have a podcast called Red Cow Arcade and occasionally post clips to Instagram, the gang knows that newer platforms like TikTok may well be a little beyond them and their audience.
“We tend to lag behind on this stuff because first of all our audience isn’t that young. They tend to be our age,” Frain said. “Second, by trade, we are film and video professionals, and our background and experience is in creating highly produced content, and YouTube is the format that perfectly matches our skills and personalities.”