FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – The Indiana State Police troopers lip-syncing to a song from the movie ‘Grease’ are shocked the video went viral so quickly.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Trooper Jonathon Amburgey said. “We went to bed and we had like a thousand views and we woke up and it was hundreds of thousands and now it’s millions of views.”
Amburgey and Trooper Brent Lemberg, both from the Fort Wayne post, worked all 17 days of the Indiana State Fair this year.
“We were partners at the fair and we work together up here and we just decided to have fun with it,” Amburgey said.
They recorded the lip-sync to ‘Summer Nights’ on the last day of the fair with two troopers from the Peru post.
“We were just trying to come up with a funny male/female duet and everyone knows the movie ‘Grease’ and we just came up with that one,” Amburgey said.
Lemberg ended up singing the Olivia Newton John parts.
“We didn’t even talk about who’s going to do it. It just happened,” Lemberg said.
But, what happened next, none of the troopers expected. It went viral overnight, even appearing on the show ‘Inside Edition’ on Monday night.
“It’s blowing our minds,” Lemberg said. “We were just trying to have a good time . It’s fun to see how quickly it’s taken off.”
The troopers also didn’t expect the PR campaign the video created either. Thousands of comments all over social media thank police officers for their service to their communities and say they loved seeing another side of law enforcement.
“We are people too and this was a good way to show that. It wasn’t our intention. We thought a few of our friends would laugh at it and that would be it,” Amburgey said. “But, for the entire United States to come together and see that we are people and have a sense of humor and we’re not robots and that we care about people and want people to smile is awesome.”
The movie soundtrack lip-sync-along wasn’t their only video, though. The funny duo doesn’t remember which video was their first, but as the ideas came, the recordings were made.
“We both have a good sense of humor so when they came to us, we would just talk about it and run with it,” Amburgey said.
Amburgey can be seen holding back a smile in most of them.
“Yeah, I can’t help it,” he laughed. “I just smile all the time and it was hard for me to keep a straight face.”
In one video, they ask, ‘Where’s Waldo’ as they drive by the cartoon character hiding in the background.
“A group of kids were doing a scavenger hunt and they had to find Waldo, so we approached Waldo and asked if we could use him in one of our videos. He was awesome about it and he was a good sport. That one took three takes. The others only took one or two takes,” Amburgey said with a smile.
Another clip titled, “Don’t Come Between a Trooper and His Grilled Cheese,” plays the song ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ after Amburgey hits a speed bump in the golf cart causing Lemberg to “drop” his sandwich.
“We had a couple of videos and were trying to brain storm some new ones. We were listening to the radio and that song came on and we kind of came up with it together. That was a one-take one,” Amburgey explained.
The troopers used cell phones to take the videos and play the music through a Bluetooth speaker. You have to wonder what the fair-goers were thinking as they drove by.
“They’d kind of laugh and we’d wave and just move on,” Amburgey laughed.
Now, people across the country are getting to laugh too.
“Seeing all the positive comments posted online has been unbe
lievable,” Amburgey said. “Someone may have been having a bad day and they say, ‘Thanks for the smile. I really needed it.’ It’s a cool experience.”
The only complaint people had about the Grease video was that it was only 40 seconds long.
“We had no clue it was going to blow up like it did or maybe we would have done the whole song,” Amburgey said.
While it’s not in a golf cart cruising around the State Fair, the troopers did record one more lip-sync song just for NewsChannel 15. And for their thousands of new-found fans, of course.