December 11, 2007

Idiocracy kool-aid -- red or blue?

FreshDV notes reports (Spout Blog, Guardian UK) that "Fox had struck a deal to produce real-life Brawndo, the fictional energy drink that threw the Earth into chaos in Idiocracy, a film that Fox barely released and all but refused to promote." Perhaps part of the reason for all this was that the Fox News brand remained pretty much intact (though more muscular) in the movie's dystopian future.

And as The Chutry Experiment notes, Fox and pals are "going full steam ahead to market Brawndo using viral videos on YouTube, a Brawndo website, and other social networking tools. And, yes, you can 'friend' Brawndo on Facebook and MySpace." Sort of reminds me how The Merry Pranksters kool-aid was re-branded by the SF People's Temple at Jonestown. The Brawndo episode also comes from San Francisco, this time from Omni Consumer Products LLC which borrows its name from Robocop.

By the way, design in Idiocracy was fun; see "The graphic design of Mike Judge's Idiocracy" at SpeakUp and Idiocracy is Reality at graphpaper.com (which notes the "flat buns" burger commercial). Seen at the left is the movie's US President -- a porn star and wrestling champ -- at the "House of Representin'", which is sponsored by Pepsi. The Cabinet is sponsored by Carl's Jr, which devolved a new tag line, “F$#k you! I’m eating!” Video segments can be found via YouTube and Google.

At this point you really can't be sure who's zooming who. As shown at FreshDV, the Brawndo attempt to go viral mimics both Ideocracy and this viral video (one viewing is more than enough):


And here's a segment from The Daily Show on Brawndo's sister 'Cocaine Energy Drink':

2 comments:

spocko said...

Cocaine energy drink! That will put some pep in ya!

richard said...

Nobody will remember the directive when they are enjoying an energy drink. I experienced a
website that is totally based on energy drink truth.