Sep 11 2015

Quiznos Commodifies Burner Culture [Updates]

20th Century Fox has a new film coming out “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”. Quiznos makes sandwiches. Put two and two together, and what do you get?

Burning Man 2.0. When the Shark ate the Subway.

Here’s the “offensive” commercial:

Taco Bell did it first. Without any known repercussions. So why wouldn’t their competitors try it too?

BMOrg are pissed. Could it be because these guys hit a little too close to home, and somehow nailed EXACTLY the problems happening with our culture now? You know, the ones BMOrg either deny exist, or tell us they’ve listened to us and completely solved (while actually doing nothing), or if there is any acknowledgement, blame on us?

Laugh at yourselves, Burners. Because some of this is really freaking ridiculous. A unicorn car that shoots fireballs? Is that somehow not ridiculous?

Some choice quotes:

“Don’t you understand?

Understand what?

How to look cool on Instagram?”

…

“They lied to us. They said it was an anti establishment society based on radical self expression. Now it’s become a place for rich people to tick off their bucket list.“

True dat.

How does BMOrg respond? “Ha ha, yes that’s funny, everything we do is just an ironic prank, like all the Satan/Hellco stuff, or being the first org since the Nazis to officially employ a Minister of Propaganda?”

Nope. Threats of lawsuits. Quelle surprise.

From the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Burning Man isn’t laughing at a new Quizno’s advertisement.

The toasted sandwich company published a parody video, “Out of the Maze and into the Playa,” on YouTube earlier this week, a day after the weeklong utopian arts celebration in Northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert concluded on Monday. The plot sends the characters of the “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” a not-so-well reviewed science fiction thriller to be released later this month, to Burning Man as a test of character…

Burning Man takes issue with the clip and is considering legal action, not because of the mockery it makes of the more than 70,000-person annual event but because the video is theft of the event’s intellectual property, according to Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham.

“We are pretty proactive about protecting our 10 principles, one of which is decommodification,” Graham said. “We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down…We’ll be coordinating with our legal team to see what action we can take…Burning Man’s busiest time of year, when it comes to defending decommodification, is immediately after the Burn, Graham said, when companies and individuals attempt to market their products by paring [pairing] them with Burning Man content.

…Burning Man has taken it to legal action in the past…Burning Man won the lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild, Graham said…Burning Man makes an effort to support certain businesses that serve the Burner community, many of them Reno-based, by promoting them in one of Burning Man’s annual newsletters each year before the event.

It’s not Commodification when BMOrg does it. Still, I’m all for supporting local Burner-friendly businesses, including the 100+ vendors licensed to sell stuff at Burning Man. Quiznos seems pretty Burner-friendly to me; clearly, they understand where our culture is at in late 2015.

Burning Man had not taken any legal action against Quizno’s as of Thursday evening.

[Source: RGJ]

I find some chuckles in the empty threat of the $30 million ~~charity~~ tax-exempt non-profit BMOrg suing the $8 billion phone hackers over at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, or the $14 billion hedge fund behind Quiznos. To make their case, Larry and Marian would have to swear on the Bible that parody is not a legitimate art form and must be censored and suppressed. Then they would have to prove how their sold out event was financially harmed by millions of dollars worth of mainstream media advertising – while the other Fox product, The Simpsons, can parody Burning Man and that’s totally fine.

Personally, I think this Quiznos ad is brilliant. Timely. Poignant. Very funny. #nailedit!

“The course of this festival will determine the course of humanity. Until next week when you return to your desk jobs”

If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

Perhaps this is karma for all the Satanic pranking of Burners by BMOrg lately, such as “bugs are here and they’re everywhere and they crawl up inside you and bite” at burningman.com, or “don’t share photos that we share on social media, that’s why we have teams of lawyers”; or lining up at Will Crawl for 8 hours with no shade or water to pick up your $400 tickets; or the idea that we are saving the world through a dusty rave; or that we are supporting the arts by underpaying artists and screwing them in contracts and saying they shouldn’t ever sign their work. Even the theme this year was that we’re all chumps, suckers, and rubes, while they’re hucksters and carny barkers.

It sure has seemed like they’re laughing at us in recent years. Well, now the whole world is laughing at them. Let’s see how they take it. So far, not so good.

Given the recent mass media obsession with Burning Man, this lawsuit (were it to ever eventuate) could rapidly become the biggest story in the world – a convenient distraction from the real current affairs of global economic meltdown, Hillary keeping State Department secrets on a home-brew email server shared with her tax exempt non profit, refugees who are all young men of fighting age storming Europe, and Israel/US lining up against Russia/Iran in Syria over gas pipeline routes.

BMOrg’s usual trick of going to the media to fight their battles against small town judges and sheriffs, ain’t gonna work against the world’s biggest and most powerful media group and the world’s 13th largest hedge fund.

Chocotacos just seem so quaint these days.

[Update 9/12/15 1:58am PST]

Quiznos is a privately held company with revenues of about $400 million and more than 2000 stores around the world. It is the #2 sandwich maker in the US, after Subway. Since 2012 they have been majority owned by Avenue Capital Group, an international investment firm with 200 employees and offices in 8 countries. It is the 13th largest hedge fund in the world, 15% owned by Morgan Stanley, with $14 billion assets under management. Chelsea Clinton worked there from 2006-2009.

The founders of Avenue Capital previously worked for multi-billionaire Robert Bass, who is Chairman of Reno-based supersonic aviation company Aerion Corp, a DARPA contractor.

Quiznos has a long history of legal battles, they are no stranger to court and seem to have used lawsuits for marketing before.

[Update 9/12/15 3:10am PST]

Thanks very much to Nomad for finding this. Toasty.TV is part of a broader Quiznos parody marketing campaign.

Jul 20 2015

Burning Man Scene Pulled From Freaks and Geeks Vacation Reunion

Re-blogged from Cinema Blend:

Late last year, Vacation co-director John Francis Daley revealed to the world that he would be using his directorial debut to reunite with his former Freaks and Geeks co-stars Martin Starr and Samm Levine, adding that he wanted to use the film as an opportunity “to get the three geeks back together in the same project.” Sadly, it turns out that the trio actually wound up being cut from Vacation, and there’s a pretty lame reason for it: the sequence where the cameos occurred just didn’t work.

SlashFilm attended a special early showing of Vacation at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this month, and it was during a post-screening Q&A session that John Francis Daley and his co-director Jonathan Goldstien that the reasoning for the cut Freaks and Geeks moment was explained. According to the filmmakers, the sequence that Daley, Martin Starr, and Sam Levine were in simply wound up not working, and it “wasn’t as funny as they hoped it would be in the final cut of the movie.”

Unfortunately, Daley didn’t offer any specific details about how he worked himself and his Freaks and Geeks co-stars into Vacation – but he did reveal that it was going to be a part of a scene that found Ed Helms‘ Rusty Griswold and his family get stuck at the desert festival known as Burning Man. You can’t actually see any of the actors in any of the marketing materials that Warner Bros. has released for the movie, though there are scenes shown in the trailer set at Burning Man (including a moment with an exploding car):

Justice League Dark

While the Freaks and Geeks reunion didn’t make it into the final cut of Vacation, it was actually shot – and it’s not disappearing forever. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstien apparently confirmed that the special moment will be included with the deleted scenes in when Vacation hits Blu-ray and DVD – which will presumably happen at some point in the fall. In the meantime, comedy fans will be able to catch the continuation of the National Lampoon series when the new movie – co-starring Christina Applegate, Leslie Mann, Beverly D’Angelo, Skyler Gisondo, Charlie Day, Chris Hemsworth, and Chevy Chase – will be in theaters on July 29th.

And for you Freaks and Geeks fans who find this news unacceptable and need more of the Paul Feig-created show in their lives, the good news is that the home video company Shout Factory has announced that the cancelled-too-soon series is in the process of making its way to Blu-ray. So stay tuned for more details on that front!

[Source: Cinema Blend]

Dec 17 2014

“Like Burning Man Gone Wrong”

That’s what Vulture has to say about the trailer for the new movie Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the Mad Max franchise by Australian director George Miller. The series has been a big inspiration behind the costumes, art cars, and overall post-apocalyptic steampunk anarchist vibe of Burning Man.

Vulture:

The New Trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road Is Like Burning Man Gone Wrong

WIRED was effusive in its praise and excitement:

After watching this clip we wanted to file this under “Greatest Movie Ever Made” even though it’s probably a little too soon to make that call. That said, we’ve got a feeling, deep in our bones, that this movie will be spectacular. George Miller looks like he’s out for bloody vengeance, seeking to rain down hate on anyone who’s dared make an “action” movie since he left the post-apocalypse behind. The Godfather of the original Mad Max trilogy has had a weirdly touchy feely resume since going beyond the Thunderdome 30 years ago. His last four projects have been:Lorenzo’s Oil, Babe: Pig in the City, and two Happy Feet movies. Apparently, handling such sentimental fare has built a swirling tempest of rage inside Miller, because Fury Road looks like it’s not just here to build on the steampunk hellfire deathrace legacy of the first three Max movies. The new Tom Hardy edition of Earth-gone-wrong wants to double down, take eight shots of Absinthe, and inhale a dozen rails of meth before plunging an adrenaline needle into its own heart. Considering we have computers now and they do everything, Fury Road and its very real explosions don’t even feel possible. Who let this happen? Did Miller film on Mars? How many undisclosed on-set deaths will we hear about 10 years from now? This is horrible to say, but if the feature film is even half as good as these first two trailers, it might be worth whatever price was paid—in blood or treasure—to get it made. The only thing left to do between now and May 15th is build a screen big enough with definition high enough to do it justice. We’ll be waiting.

The future belongs to the mad:

Mad Max Mastermind Miller

George Miller went on from Mad Max to make such Hollywood classics as Happy Feet and Babe: Pig In The City.

Burners of a certain age will remember Tina Turner’s epic role in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, part 3 of the series, which was released in 1985 – the year before Burning Man was born. That’s right, when the last Mad Max movie was made, there was no such thing as Burning Man. Will there be any references to the event in this new installment? It seems like the special effects might have improved, and Tina has been upgraded to Charlize Theron, but otherwise, it’s more of the same good stuff that has made the franchise a cult classic, and inspired generations of Burners to go mad in the desert.

Check out a still youthful Mel Gibson: