Hasta La Creative!

Late at night, when Wes Craven and David Cronenberg sit around trying to scare each other at the Horror Movie Directors’ Spooky Mansion of Fear (look it up, it’s a thing), I’m pretty sure the most frightening movie either of them can think of is Disney’s disturbing 1940 classic, Pinocchio.

A dark meditation on vice, morality, whale digestion and the human experience, Pinocchio is unsettling and bleak on a level you just don’t see in modern movies aimed at kids.

So it makes total sense that the ominous audio from the first Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer could be reworked seamlessly into a creeptastic teaser for Pinoccio, source of the “I’ve Got No Strings” tune intoned by James Spader as the villainous Ultron. 

Check out Nerd Reactor’s sterling work on the mashup below, followed by the real trailer.

Walt Disney’s truly disturbing 1940 cartoon version of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. So it makes total sense that the audio for the creeptastic trailer to Avengers: Age of Ultron…

Honestly, the mashup merely includes the top scariest moments. They don’t even have the bit where the Coachman goes from kindly old weirdo to Satanic monster and his grin fills the frame.

If anyone needs me, I’m under my desk.

Serious commercials are hard to do well, but when you’re doing content specifically for TNT’s upcoming Sean Bean spy thriller, Legends, it’s sort of mandatory.

So Hyundai and TNT turned to New Form, the ad shop run by movie idea guys Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, to create an energetic three-part story that will air over a combined total of 11 minutes during the limited commercial slots of Wednesday’s Legends pilot.

TNT has pulled out all the marketing stops for the launch of Legends, and several of its ideas have been rather clever. (Given its star’s career history, my favorite is the #dontkillseanbean hashtag game on Twitter). Hyundai’s long-form ad, however, is certainly the flashiest.

In the three-part short film, a man chases down the shadowy corporation that’s kidnapped his girl, and while the new Hyundai Genesis sedan plays a major part in the show, viewers won’t feel overly bombarded by brand messaging.

The video is part of a larger partnership around the series for Hyundai, too. Not only will the automaker sponsor the show on air, but it will also have category exclusivity and will sponsor digital versions of the show, too.

More broadly, the digital presentation is a nice perk for cable subscribers, who will be able to get the show’s premiere episode a week before it debutes via TNT’s on-demand service or the WatchTNT app. The episode will also play on TNTDrama.com, though it requires subscriber verification (as does most everything these days).

While it’s true HBO is not an ad-supported network, Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver made an exception Sunday, uttering the words rarely heard on the premium cable network: “We’ll be right back.”

Of course what followed wasn’t a real commercial, but instead a GM ad parody created to punctuate Oliver’s hilarious (and disturbing) dissection of internal practices at GM, where a long list of defects in cars over the past decade led to an even longer list of no-go words and phrases compiled in a memo, which blacklisted phrases like “deathtrap,” “defective,” “catastrophically flawed,” “Hindenburg”—you get the idea.

Obviously the point of the memo was to make sure none of those words ended up associated with the cars once they got to the market—a sensible notion, from a branding perspective, but probably not a directive that was terribly wise to put on paper. So after a lengthy segment eviscerating GM (remember, this is the guy who stretched potshots at quetionably healthy drink Pom Wonderful over two episodes), Oliver cut away to a fake GM ad containing almost all those words the car company didn’t want associated with its brand.

Just to tie a bow on the whole takedown, HBO is even running Oliver’s GM bit as a lengthy pre-roll ad on YouTube this week. From a comedy perspective, the segment is gold. From a marketing perspective, it’s like watching a Hellraiser movie.

Source

Syfy tells Adweek exclusively that it has green-lit a third movie in its increasingly silly Sharknado franchise before even airing the second one (official title: The Second One).

The first flick cost the network a scant $250,000, a cost repaid in social chatter and fan love. Now the network has committed to a third film to be set in a yet-to-be-determined city, presumably with the rest of the principal cast from Sharknado and Sharknado 2: The Second One, provided no airborne carnivorous fish spend their last moments on Earth munching on Tara Reid or Ian Ziering between now and then.

So here, without further ado, are five pitches we feel Syfy should consider while the network tries to figure out how next to fling a funnel cloudful of surprised apex predators teeth-first into the public imagination.

Oh, and for the record, Sharkando 2 premieres Wednesday, July 30, just after San Diego Comic Con. Sharknado 3 is slated to air in summer 2015.

3harknado

Starring Nathan Fillion, Portia de Rossi, Alison Brie and Joel Hodgson, the third Sharknado tears apart San Diego during the reunion of cult classic TV series SpaceShark 2025. During a panel Q&A with fans, the down-on-their-luck cast is rent asunder by the very monsters their fictional characters used to battle. Will they learn who engineered this catastrophe? And when they do, will the answer shock them?

Sharknado 3: Sharksplode!

Executive produced by Michael Bay with 35 percent new footage, the world really has a mess on its hands when a waterspout hits a once-in-a-lifetime … uh, thrice-in-a-lifetime … school of sharks—and then a mid-Atlantic oil rig! Now filled with flammable light sweet crude, the angry and frightened fish burst into waterproof flames on impact with the ground. Our only hope may be the brave men and women of the Navy's elite SHaRK unit, who must place themselves in harm's way between hundreds of sharksplosions… and Big Ben.

Wes Anderson's Splendid Third Sharknado

Directed by Wes Anderson from a screenplay co-written with Roman Coppola, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeff Goldblum star as romantic rivals Commander Jonas Welk and Chef Brent Klein, respectively the captain and the cook of a six-story-tall, 700-foot-long airliner nearing the end of its six-year mission to explore cirrus cloud formations. Tensions run high during the biweekly midair refuelings, though discomfort is offset somewhat by the opulent ballrooms and smoking lounges aboard the jet. When a probe disturbs a nest of rare flying sharks atop the highest mountain in the world, the two men must put aside their differences—and their shared adoration of the first mate (Tilda Swinton)—to rescue the frightened creatures from a dizzying plummet to their demise. Meanwhile, Commander Welk comes to terms with the death of his sister.

Sharknado 3: Shark Fu

An action-packed anime set in the coastal Japanese city of Yokohama in the year 3015, this six-part miniseries follows five cyborg warriors unfairly expelled from the city for dishonoring their jetpack clan, though the fault actually lies with the duplicitous chieftan of an enemy gang of motorcycle-riding scalp-hunters. When the biker gang leader's rash actions trigger a waterspout over the radioactive-shark-infested Uraga Channel, our heroes must regain their honor by developing an entirely new form of airborne martial arts combat before the storm full of sharks tears through Yokohama … on its way to Tokyo.

Sharknado 3: POV

A happy-go-lucky shark, minding its own business off the Great Barrier Reef, is unceremoniously flung into the sky by a storm that propels it toward Queensland, Australia. Though the shark struggles to breathe in the sparse water of the storm, it manages to cling to life by bravely eating as many nourishing tourists as possible. But as the storm makes landfall, our hero begins to worry: will it be able to kill the wicked human leader and avoid the horrifying array of grenades, chainsaws and guns wielded by the human minions? And if so, how will it get back home?

Syfy, please select one or more of the above and make the check out to Adweek.

It's always hard to find the best goat scream for the occasion (Doritos devoted a lot of effort to the task). But sometimes, with what sounds like a little bit of AutoTune and some well-chosen goats, and also what appear to be a sheep and and ibex, you can, for example, record the entire theme song to HBO's popular fantasy series Game of Thrones exclusively in goat voice.

This is the work of Marca Blanca, the Spanish-language comedy company responsible for such masterpieces as the opening sequence from Friends reworked with stock footage of high-ranking Nazis, and this amazing video of live-action footage substituted for Grand Theft Auto V gameplay. The latter is in Spanish, but it doesn't matter.

Game of Goats, however, knows no language, race or creed. It is simply there for you, on the cold nights, when the only thing that can cure your loneliness is a furry omnivorous quadruped shouting in a voice that reminds you of your fourth-grade teacher.

To all other parodies of Game of Thrones, I say: "Bah!!!"

Where to start?

Benicio del Toro's spiked Billy Idol locks? Chris Pratt in a Michael Jackson leather jacket with an elderly Walkman? A raccoon wielding the very latest in tactical firearms atop a talking tree?

No, let's start with the real star of the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer, which premiered to huge fanfare Tuesday on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live (Disney is great at keeping this stuff in house, by the way—they own both Marvel Studios and ABC and will be distributing the movie, too): Scandanavian band Blue Swede's 1974 cover of "Hooked on a Feeling."

The song really probably shouldn't work with the space-opera-comedy-hybrid thing Marvel has been doing for the last couple of films (the tone here is similar to the studio's Thor: The Dark World), but it really, really does. It's a perfect counterpoint to the action and makes the absurdity of the whole enterprise part of the joke, rather than a liability. Does it work? Well, 3.5 million YouTube viewers can be wrong, but from a marketing perspective, they probably aren't. That number is rising, by the way.

The Guardians themselves have had one of the more porous member rosters in the Marvel portfolio. The current series, by Brian Bendis and Steve McNiven, was planned and set in motion while this movie was in pre-production, so it's a safe bet that the characters picked for this flick are as toyetic as possible (and indeed, are on display in multiple plastic forms in New York this week at the Javits Center for Toy Fair).

Anyway, this movie features Bradley Cooper as a talking woodland creature and Vin Diesel as an Ent. Check it out below.

Duelling billboards? Yes, indeed, that's what Starz is going for—in a fun partnership with Captain Morgan—with this outdoor campaign in Los Angeles for its new Michael Bay-produced pirate show Black Sails, which managed to knock the top out of the network's original premiere ratings with 3.5 million viewers this weekend.

The show has had a major presence in the geekosphere for half a year now. "I think it's the longest-lead campaign I've ever worked on," said Alison Hoffman, svp of original programming, marketing communication for Starz. "We were going to go to Comic Con San Diego, of course, and we decided to screen the entire first episode, and we had such overflow that we did it again."

Hoffman adds: "You always want to extend your reach, and Captain Morgan was kind of a first choice for us. There's this survival, hustler, thieving quality for Black Sails, and there's more fun and adventure for the Captain Morgan brand, and that was when we realized that we probably shouldn't be holding hands; we should be at war." 

So at war they are, with duelling billboards across Sunset Boulevard, complete with cannons (and cannon holes). The campaign includes other out-of-home extravagances, notably some backlit, glowing bus ads. And while Hoffman said the network took a no-peglegs, no-eyepatches approach to the show proper, it has given in occasionally and celebrated Talk Like a Pirate Day, among other matey-related milestones.

"It's gritty and real," says Hoffman, "but at the same time … it's pirates."

All right, it's been done before, but not for a while: Nickelodeon is partnering with the ever-embattled U.S. Postal Service to promote its long-running children's series SpongeBob SquarePants, in which a member of the order dictyoceratida opts for business casual dress to spend time with a slow-witted echinoderm and a squirrel of incredibly advanced brain function with a penchant for scuba diving.

The show's hero will appear in mailbox form on street corners around the country, and postage-paid SpongeBob postcards will be available gratis at about 25,000 post offices. If you want to see a MailPants yourself, you'll need to travel to Atlanta; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Dallas; Hollywood and Orlando, Fla.; Kirkwood, Mo.; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Philadelphia; or Washington. So really, you have no excuse.

Nick has a series of videos on the letter-writing process that ties into the campaign as well as printable stationery; the whole shebang is in effect through the month of SpongeBob-related Lego and stuffed-animal buying, formerly known as December. So, by the time the last MailPants disappears on Jan. 5, you may actually have convinced your kid to write that thank you note to Nana.

If you were wandering aimlessly around Manhattan last week, you probably saw lampposts with a flier showing a cheap, grainy-looking photo of a spaceship and "take one" pull tabs at the bottom telling you to go to 23rd Street and Broadway to buy a slightly used spaceship.

When you got there, the perceptive among you may have noticed the spaceship, which appeared to have crashed into the ground next to the Flatiron Building, with cartoon characters Rick and Morty from the new Adult Swim show (titled, cleverly, Rick and Morty) hanging around. (Well, actually, they were statues. Morty was still inside, and Rick was on a bench taking a slug from a bottle of XXX.) The installation is pretty impressive—they even mangled some chairs that look like the furniture that sits in the public area around the building and arranged foam bricks that look exactly like chunks of the tan pavement.

The network's campaign for the show has been an elaborate one—there's an ad on Craigslist for the spaceship, too, as well as normal(ish) posters around town. The network also posted the first 22-minute episode of the show, which premieres Monday at 10:30 p.m., on YouTube. You can check it out below, along with the net's time-lapse video of its spaceship assemblage.

And we've got an interview with co-creator Dan Harmon here.

Here's a snippet we had to cut to make the interview fit in the magazine, but is still pretty cool: "It's very much like Doctor Who and Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker's Guide, and Willy Wonka," Harmon said when asked why he liked crazy, antisocial characters like Rick. "They just don't have time to interface with the people around them in a way that makes anybody comfortable. I think the answer over time is that you'll come to believe that he's a real person. I think even by the end of these first 10 episodes, we've figured out that the more hours you log with this guy, he never really jumps the shark in terms of revealing that he loves all the people around him, or crying and saying, 'Oh, it's so hard to be this big a prick,' but you get it, or you get that you don't get it. It made me so excited that this character could possibly live for a long time."

Check out the clip below to see how insane Rick is, or stop by the Flatiron to say hi until the end of today.