BEN FM’s Purrfect 2025 April Fool’s Prank!

No, that wasn’t the Stray Cats you were hearing yesterday. It was our 2025 April Fool’s prank. 

This month, BEN FM turned 20 years old, and if you’ve listened for a while, you know that every year we do some sort of prank to celebrate April Fool's Day. We’ve done everything from playing all of Weird Al one year to 24 hours of TV show theme songs. We even sped up all the music one year (that resulted in a LARGE amount of hate emails). The Kidz Bop music year was a favorite for families, while others loved the fake commercials another year.

My personal favorite was the year we had Philly comedian Chip Chantry pretend to be a bumbling new DJ all day messing up the names of every song title and artist. The best part of that prank was how kind BEN FM’s listeners were while letting him know his mistakes. So patient and sweet and a really great example of the kindness of people in our region. 

Cut to 2025. Were you listening to BEN FM on Tuesday? Did you hear a cat? We every so often added a tiny meow sound effect into the music on BEN FM for April Fool's Day this year. We underestimated the animal lovers in this region and the lengths they’d go to potentially rescue a cat stuck in their vehicle engines or lost in their offices, which was so paw-some to see!

Many people stopped by their dealerships and mechanics to have their cars checked out, and some were even late to work as they searched for the cat they kept hearing, but never found. First, thank you for caring so much. Second, we apologize for the trouble, and hope you can purr-give us in time for next year's April Fool's Day. In retrospect, we should have gone with an intermittent bug or cricket sound. Lesson learned.

Here is a sampling of the many voice mails we received:

Expect a reply to all of the many emails too. I didn't fur-get!

We love you, and your animal loving hearts. As always, thanks for listening.

~ Kristen