Misfits Rule in Guardians of the Galaxy Trailer, but It’s the Music That Really Grabs You

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.


    



Sparefoot Steps Into the Mockumentary Genre

Would you want to work for a company that asks you to do a blindfolded trustfall off of a building? Probably not, although if Goldman Sachs asked some young jobseekers to do the trustfall while calculating a probability brainteaser, I’m sure there are people who’d sign up. That’s the point of the new faux recruiting video from SpareFoot, an Austin-based storage finder start-up. You’ll find all the trappings of an exaggerated office culture: crazy bosses, scared underlings, and an HR rep who likes Vin Diesel. We’re guessing working at SpareFoot isn’t actually like this, but CEO Chuck “Commodore” Gordon does resemble a Gary Busey stunt double (well played on the self-deprecation).

These types of office-culture riffs have been done before, but SpareFoot has chosen an interesting path by linking the video on the company website Jobs page. I’m not sure if such a jokey pitch would make me want to apply to work there, because although we get to see what SpareFoot culture isn’t like, we never really get to see what it’s actually like in the office. The risk may turn people off, but during a time when using the wrong resume font can lead employers to ignore you, having a sense of humor in the workplace feels refreshing.

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