Wednesday, January 31, 2007

AQUA TEEN TERRORIST FORCE?

In order to promote their new movie, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres, Cartoon Network has planted several electronic boxes in several major cities throughout the United States. The box has several blinking magnetic lights that are in the shapes of Ignignokt and Err, two of the shows more popular characters.

But residents of Boston mistook the boxes for bombs being planted around bridges, subways and buses. Bomb squads were called in and streets, bridges and tunnels were shut down in order to disarm the 'bombs'!

Police have arrested Peter Berdvosky, an employee of Cartoon Network's marketing team, charged under placing a hoax device that results in panic.

Is this marketing gone too far? The device wasn't a bomb and never claimed to be a bomb and now the movie is getting tons of publicity, but should the network be a little more thoughtful of the post-911 paranoid country that is the USA?

Anyway, while the show has quite a large cult following, I'm sure that the movie will not make any thing close to 'hit' numbers in the box office. The show is funny in its ten minute episode format but there is no way a whole movie will keep people's attention.

If you haven't seen the trailer, here it is.

3 comments:

Katie said...

It's stupid that people would be that paranoid... but I guess if these marketing guys are going around putting non-descript black boxes all over the place, then panic may be well founded. How identifiable were they as legit Adult Swim advertisements? Because if it was just as obvious as a billboard, then no one from AS should be getting arrested for this. If they really were just black boxes with some LED lights on them, then okay... I can appreciate stupid marketing being punished.

It doesn't matter how much marketing this movie gets. Everyone loves that show (for whatever reason) and everyone who loves the show will love the movie because it's not like the show is actually good. So if the movie sucks, the people who like the sucky show will like the sucky movie.

coolshades said...

I would think that unless this dude thought that the black boxes could be mistaken for bombs, they wouldn't have much of a basis for charging him with a crime.

Kurtis Findlay said...

The top picture is what the lights looked like. As you can see, it is clearly a cartoon character. I don't think there are many terrorists that decorate their bombs with cartoon characters.