Hasta La Creative!

If you’ve ever seen a movie about college, you know that the dean or president or whoever is always the villain, and if you can beat him at his own game, the day will be yours.

And so it is at Columbia College in Missouri, where the villain is the perfectly named President Dr. Dalrymple, and his game is Madden NFL 25.  

Dalrymple (who actually seems like a pretty fun guy and not much of a villain) has issued the video challenge below to students at his small private college, promising to buy one pupil’s textbooks for a year if he or she can win the school’s Madden Challenge on Oct. 17 and then defeat the president in a one-on-one showdown.

How big of a prize is on the line here? A recent survey of students found the average cost of books for an academic year was about $1,200. Of course, there’s no way to quantify the value of knowing the president had to cut a check for your books himself. (If he also had to carry your books to your classes for a week, turnout for the challenge would probably triple.)

The audio production on the “epic trash talk” video isn’t the best, but you have to give Dalrymple points for zingers like: “You can play as any team you’d like—the St. Louis Rams, the Dallas Cowboys, the Chicago Bears. You can even choose a professional team.”

Since students will be competing on last season’s copy of Madden (not the new Madden 2015), it’s doubtful this is a paid partnership with Electronic Arts. But we’ve put in a call to the college to find out and will update if we hear back.

YouTube star Ryan Higa takes some well-aimed shots at the college experience with this Honest College Ad video.

He's a little confused about which college experience he's targeting, though. The name of the fake college (EveRy) and the video's tone and aesthetics are a send-up of diploma mills like ITT Tech and DeVry, where annual costs are closer to $25,000 than $56,000. Higa's description more closely matches the pitfalls of a state university.

And while it takes him a little too much time to parody an ad genre that's typically shorter than a minute, he covers an admirable amount of ground and calls out many of the most frustrating aspects of the debt-accumulating process required to graduate. And it's clearly resonating with young viewers. "It would be funny," notes one YouTube viewer, "if it weren't so true and depressing.?"

Jurassic George, a rubbery T-Rex who terrorizes his hapless human sidekicks on a Barney and Friends-type show promoting the University of Alberta's free online paleobiology classes, is a prehistoric hoot.

Crafted by Evolution Bureau, the series of spots boasts daffy dances, silly (and unsettling) songs and plenty of facts about dinosaurs. George's posse of pals—clearly adults dressed as kids, which is part of the joke—steadily diminishes as the salivating saurian gobbles them down.

The four segments run at least 90 seconds, and though each could have been tighter, the series is still great fun. In the first clip, which dispels the misconception that dinosaurs and humans lived on Earth at the same time, George sings, "We were never meant to be friends/Even though it's fun to pretend/If we'd been in the same places/I would've eaten all your faces." Creepy music cues and George's psychotic dino-stare precede his feeding frenzies (which thankfully take place off camera). The final fearful survivor, by sporting a backwards baseball cap, purple suspenders and a Rush T-shirt, is just begging for extinction.