The family behind one of the viral videos of the year have broken their silence on their new found fame.
Professor Robert Kelly was giving an interview to the BBC about the political crisis in South Korea when his two adorable children and fast-acting wife hilariously gate-crashed his TV spot.
After taking a few days to process the enormity of the situation, the family is laughing about it along with the rest of us.
“I mean it was terribly cute,” Kelly told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “I saw the video like everybody else. My wife did a great job cleaning up a really unanticipated situation as best she possibly could … It was funny. If you watch the tape I was sort of struggling to keep my own laughs down. They’re little kids and that’s how things are.”
How did the incident occur? Kelly blames himself for not locking the door.
“He usually locks the door,” said his wife, Kim Jung-A. “Most of the time they come back to me after they find the locked door. But they didn’t. And then I saw the door was open. It was chaos for me.”
Jung-A says she and the kids were watching Kelly in the living room, and she was distracted because she was taking a video of Kelly on the TV with her phone. A delay in the video meant she didn’t notice her kids on the screen until it was much too late.
“We said to each other, ‘Wow, what just happened?’ ” Kelly said after it was all over, also calling the hilarious catastrophe “a comedy of errors.”
Kelly also solved one mystery from the video: The reason for his daughter’s cartoonishly confident entrance to the room. Apparently, little Marion had just returned from a school party celebrating her fourth birthday.
“She was in a hippity-hoppity mood that day because of the school party,” he said of the interview.
“As soon as she opened the door I saw her image on my screen,” he said, later adding. “Yes I was mortified, but I also want my kids to feel comfortable coming to me.”
The family went off the grid after the social media tsunami, and he says they are still adjusting to their sudden fame.
“I made this minor mistake that turned my family into YouTube stars,” he said. “It’s pretty ridiculous.”
