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Ad For Orleans Coroner Candidate: My Opponent Is Dr. Frankenstein! (VIDEO)

Eric Kleefeld | January 29, 2010, 5:03PM

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Dwight McKenna, Frank Minyard

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Check out this astonishing political ad in the upcoming New Orleans elections. The ad from Dwight McKenna, a candidate for Orleans Parish Coroner, attacks the incumbent coroner, Frank Minyard, as a Dr. Frankenstein who sells body parts -- complete with an assistant Igor, from out of the old Universal Studios movies!

"Igor! Igor!" the mad scientist says.

"Yes, Doctor!" the hunchbacked assistant replies.

"We need a heart, a spleen, and a liver, for tonight's sale!"

"Yes, Dr. Minyard!"

All of us here at TPM initially thought this was too good to be true. But Kevin Allman from The Gambit assured us that it is in fact running on local television, and that he himself saw it just last night during a commercial break in the mayoral debate.

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57 comments

Recommend Recommend (1)

January 29, 2010 5:26 PM

Just hilarious! Now That's a smear political ad.

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January 29, 2010 6:19 PM in reply to CityGuy

Wild. Is there some kernel of truth in here someplace? The first bit ("It's unconscionable...body parts sold out of the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office!") has to be based on something, right? I mean, they can't just go around claiming that...right? Right? Please tell me that's right....

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January 29, 2010 7:18 PM in reply to hunter

Jeeze Louise! You're talkin' about the home of Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw and Lee harvey Oswald. Anything is possible, but don't make it so.

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January 29, 2010 5:33 PM

abby normal.

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ohyeathatsright

January 29, 2010 5:37 PM in reply to tpmgary

It's Frahnken-steen!

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January 29, 2010 5:51 PM in reply to ohyeathatsright

I thought he was I-Gor?

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January 29, 2010 7:34 PM in reply to CityGuy

Couldn't be. No hump.

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January 30, 2010 5:27 PM in reply to EastWest

What hump?

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agio

January 29, 2010 5:52 PM

Coroner is an elected office? Somehow that just doesn't seem like such a good idea.

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ohyeathatsright

January 29, 2010 7:03 PM in reply to agio

Case and point above.

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January 30, 2010 9:50 AM in reply to agio

haha...thanks for making me laugh

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January 29, 2010 5:54 PM

Good God. I've known Dr. Frank Minyard for over 35 years, and he's certainly not Frankenstein.

Frank's a great guy who used to come out on Rotal Street and play the trumpet so the cops couldn't arrest us for playing street music (as coroner, he sat on the police review board).

But that's New Orleans politics.

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January 29, 2010 6:58 PM in reply to Bass Ace

But did he ever sell you a body part?

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January 29, 2010 7:11 PM in reply to Gopherit

No! But some of the gigs he sent my way sure helped keep me from selling any of mine!

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January 29, 2010 5:56 PM

STOP ORGAN HARVESTING AND THE REANIMATION OF CORPSES NOW! There are zombies and monsters everywhere in New Orleans. Did you see them at the last Voodoo Fest? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHzEp4X34cg

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Mike Hickerson

January 29, 2010 6:27 PM in reply to hubigzapps

It's not the zombies so much as the frikkin' vampires that bug me.

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January 29, 2010 7:10 PM in reply to Mike Hickerson

Zombies? How embarassin'. All this time I've been afraid of zambonies, and I ain't been to a hockey game in years, I gar-on-tee.

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KnoxHarrington

January 29, 2010 5:58 PM

What's McKenna's next ad going to be? "I make this promise to the voters of New Orleans: I will never have sex with a corpse as long as I am coroner. Has Minyard ever made this promise? Why not?"

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January 29, 2010 7:30 PM in reply to KnoxHarrington

Wait.... Sex with a corpse isn't like, illegal or anything. Is it??

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January 29, 2010 10:02 PM in reply to CityGuy

remember; New Orleans...

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January 29, 2010 6:10 PM

It's art!

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January 29, 2010 6:14 PM

I love the NO accent, too.

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January 30, 2010 3:45 PM in reply to Powkat

It sounded like a Brooklyn accent to me. Maybe Jersey City. lol

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January 31, 2010 11:54 AM in reply to Reefdancer

A.J. Liebling wrote "There is a New Orleans city accent . . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans."

The dialect is known as "yat."

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February 1, 2010 8:49 PM in reply to sj

Not only that but where do you think the phrase

Who Dat? as in "Who dat say they gonna beat dem Saints?"

It comes from the way the yat's talk in New Orleans. Yes these are real people. This is more typical of New Orleans than any of the so called accents you will hear in the movie "The Big Easy" which are just wrong on so many levels.

People here have bumper stickers that say y@ (yat) he he. They are all over town.

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VivaAmerica!

January 29, 2010 6:21 PM

Wait. Coroners are elected?

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January 29, 2010 6:25 PM in reply to VivaAmerica!

Sadly, in New Orleans they are. Which explains the pan-Louisiana corpse reanimation epidemic we face today. Sad times. Expected to see something in the State of the Union

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January 29, 2010 7:54 PM in reply to hubigzapps

"pan-Louisiana corpse reanimation"

That may explain how Vitter got elected...

Can zombies,,ummm, I mean re-animated-corpse-americans, eligible to vote? It could really explain a lot of La. politicians...

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January 29, 2010 9:41 PM in reply to brianm0122

Marie Leveau for Coroner!

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January 29, 2010 9:56 PM in reply to brianm0122

post mortem politics?
surely those would be mail-in?

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January 29, 2010 9:58 PM in reply to JEP07

Zombies at the polls, sounds like a great B movie.

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January 29, 2010 10:02 PM in reply to JEP07

Didn't The Dead get busted there?

Or so the song says...

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The Baroness

January 30, 2010 6:17 PM in reply to brianm0122

Well, getting the dead to vote always seemed to work so well in Chicago....

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January 31, 2010 6:36 PM in reply to brianm0122

Yeah, it's very common on the morning after Fat Tuesday.

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The Baroness

January 29, 2010 6:22 PM

Parts is parts........

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TavernWench

January 29, 2010 7:19 PM

Why does the "Coroner" sound like a bad impression of Jackie Mason?

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January 29, 2010 7:52 PM

Well, if you're going to get into the gutter, no sense in playing around.

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January 29, 2010 8:16 PM

Are we sure they aren't autopsying HCR???????

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doggie daddy

January 29, 2010 9:42 PM

Maybe a little cream soda you get for me?

Be a goya not a mench. I work here all day
long not even a zombie to talk with and all
I ask for is a little drink. Is that too much
to ask for already!?

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January 29, 2010 10:01 PM

DickDay, if you're lurking, you need to offer your first campaign-ad of the day award, by the time November rolls around, we can vote on our favorites.

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January 30, 2010 12:22 AM

Hey, let's not be so heartless. Dr. McKenna needs a job and Dr. Minyard has been coroner for a long time now. Dr. McKenna used to be on the Orleans Parish School Board but that was before his conviction on federal tax evasion charges.

No organs were ever removed from the coroner's office. This is a very old scandal but some very small bone chips and some corneas were removed during autopsies without permission of the relatives, according to their lawsuit. Following that lawsuit, that practice was discontinued.

Props to Dr. McKenna for his hilarious new ad. He has absolutely no chance in hell of winning. He ran against Minyard back in 2002 and lost. By the way, the dude playing Igor is actually political consultant Bill Schultz, who is responsible for creating this monstrosity of a campaign ad.

I wonder if Schultz thinks this will be good for his business as a campaign consultant?

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January 30, 2010 1:13 AM

Just a note to the individual who questioned the wisdom of electing a coroner:

This is normal practice here in South Carolina, the only state even nearly as screwed up as Louisiana. I can assure you that having an elected coroner is the last line of defense against, well, the worst abuses by the good-ol-boy system. A sheriff with a lackey as coroner could do a lot of damage in this neck of the woods...

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The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve

January 30, 2010 11:33 AM in reply to trevzb

Kentucky does it too. They're always trying to keep within shouting distance of the leaders in that race.

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January 30, 2010 1:21 AM

He could have a column in the TImes Picayune called Coroner's Corner.

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January 30, 2010 1:33 AM

> Hey, let's not be so heartless.

Heartless? You need a heart? I got one here, let you have it very reasonable. It vas removed from a Blue Dog who vent Republican; he didn't need it anymore.

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January 30, 2010 8:40 AM in reply to pstamler

"removed from a Blue Dog"
with a pair of tweezers...

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rambler american

January 30, 2010 9:37 AM in reply to pstamler

"vent Republican"? You got some spleenin' to do.

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rambler american

January 30, 2010 6:10 AM

Explains Bobby Jindal. He's the zombie Mr Rogers.

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January 30, 2010 9:47 AM in reply to rambler american

"It's--a sinister day in the lab'ratory..."

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The Baroness

January 30, 2010 6:20 PM in reply to rambler american

And as with Mayor Mark Funkhouser of Kansas City, they BOTH need to get their neck bolts tightened!

Of course, in Jindal's case, it would be to keep his head from spinning off...

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January 30, 2010 10:53 AM

Folks, this ad is a play on a 1960's New Orleans TV movie host "Morgus".

One of the TV stations had a weekly horror movie that was hosted by a local dentist-would-be-actor who played "Morgus the Magnificent", very much along the lines on the way some of the cable channels had movie hosts in the 1990s - the host would introduce the movie and return with every commercial break. The main difference was that is was so local. Morgus was a "mad scientist" who lived in the "old ice house" (now abandoned because everyone was using electric refrigerators) with his assistant, Chopsley, a six-and-a-half foot goon who wore an executioner's robe and hood, carried an axe and never spoke (and who was, in real life, a motorcycle cop in nearby St. Bernard Parish). Morgus hosted every movie with a parallel story of his own, usually a play on the theme or story in the movie. One I remember was a movie in which the characters were involved in a spy plot in which they would inject themselves with a substance that would render their faces plastic and they could disguise themselves as someone else to carry out their spying. Morgus cooked up a batch of the stuff himself in his ice house lab and had Chopsley inject him with it, but of course he screwed up and essentially began melting. "Chopsley, I'm melting!"

Really, it was great stuff and way too good for local entertainment. And you miss half the humor of the ad if you have never seen Morgus the Magnificent.

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January 30, 2010 10:33 PM in reply to mudplanet

Thanks, Mudplanet!!

As a native New Orleanean, the first thing I thought of with this ad was Morgus with (the late?) Sid Noel as Morgus, and I never had any idea who played Chopsley.

Minyard's has been coroner for 30 years. His claim to fame was that he was a jazz musician--clarinet I think--along with being an MD. Actually, elected coroners are quite common throughout the U.S. and the UK as well. They are usually not Doctors however but elected politicians or political appointees. The Doctors who perform autopsies is such places are called Medical Examiners and work for the coroner. The coroner issues death certificates and in cases of death under suspicious circumstances conducts inquests with juries to find facts. E.g.: "death by misadventure;" "death by foul play."

Thanks for reviving a nostalgic memory of some wonderful late Saturday nights in NOLA! Geaux Saints!

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WiliamWalace

January 30, 2010 11:53 AM

I like turtles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y&feature=related

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ejg3

January 30, 2010 12:05 PM

I guess this election is all about determining who is dead right. No Grateful Dead background music?

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January 30, 2010 10:26 PM

why shouldn't zombies vote? the dead vote in Illinois.

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zombielogic

February 7, 2010 1:42 AM

Wow. This is ad is stolen virtually wholesale from a fictitious race for the Winnebago County Coroner in 2008 between Andrew Davis, who was running as a Frankenstein and Thomas L. Vaultonburg, who was running as the nation's first Zombie (Z) Party candidate. That's the fictitious campaign ad, created in 2008.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fwatch%253Fv%253D2H9d7DWr5BA&h=135b701778ee8fdaaf3d0949bd0c189e&ref=mf

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Tosh

March 9, 2010 4:40 PM

haha wow i really like how they try and make the other running candidates look bad

kamagra m65 jacket

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