A Clockwork Orange alternate poster
 
Choosing the right art for a movie poster is harder than you might think. When it comes to iconic movie posters of the last 40 or so years, some of them are so incredibly effective that’s it takes an effort to recall that it took a specific person’s creative impulse to concoct the poster from scratch, and several other people, most likely, to have the good sense to approve it. In other words, it could have gone any number of other directions.

If I say to you, “Clockwork Orange movie poster,” you can probably summon up an image of the thing I’m talking about—without me showing it to you. How interesting to find out that one of the early alternatives (above) bore zero resemblance to the end result, with its unforgettable image of nasty Alex leering out from behind that A shape. Bill Gold, one of the acknowledged masters of the movie poster, was responsible for both the great Clockwork Orange poster we know and admire and the overly detailed, ridiculously 1970s, sci-fi-novel-ish version at the top of this page. Much the same sort of thing is true of Pulp Fiction and Mystic River and plenty of others. 

Bill Gold was also responsible for the classic poster for the 1972 box office sensation The Exorcist. You might recall the spooky, ice-cold image of Max von Sydow’s reluctant, serious Father Merrin underneath a lamppost, approaching the MacNeils’ Georgetown dwelling in the dead of night. But it was almost not so! Below is a far more conventional take Gold cooked up for consideration.
 

The Exorcist alternate poster
 
The British events website Daybees has a fascinating gallery of movie-posters-that-almost-were, featuring the work of just a bare handful of designers while still managing to cover an impressive range of classic movies, from Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon to Batman and Ocean’s Eleven.

“Alternate 2” for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is quite simply gorgeous, while “Alternate 2” for Mystic River looks like it took some underling about ten minutes. The alternate version of the poster for Tim Burton’s Batman isn’t horrible, but it’s very, very different from the Batman logo used in the final product.

In some ways, James Verdesoto and Vivek Mathur‘s Pulp Fiction offers the most interesting case. We seldom appreciate how bold and striking the Pulp Fiction poster is, but the alternate takes are almost painfully ‘90s and frankly show a lack of confidence in the movie—relying on blurry “slacker”-style imagery and the trendy lower-case lettering of the moment (remember sex lies and videotape?)—if you happened upon one of the alternate Pulp Fiction posters nowadays, you’d be forgiven for wondering if there wasn’t an Edward Burns retrospective happening or something. 
 

Pulp Fiction alternate poster
 
via Cinephilia and Beyond

 
Lemmy Kilmister makes an (amusing) appearance in this British TV advert for the chocolate-covered, wafer-biscuit bar Kit Kat from 2001.

The ad features a selection of (I guess what you’d call) UK celebrities, such as former Manchester United player Roy Keane (known for being a bit of a hardman—he once deliberate broke another player’s leg) who is seen practicing his needlepoint; the late comic actor Mel Smith exercises; model/actress Kelly Brook rejects an outfit for being too revealing; some long haired fop asks to have his locks shorn; sexist comedian Bernard Manning manages to go against type by being nice; and the Daleks bring peace and love. You’ll see what Lemmy gets up to—it’s just shame he’s advertising a Nestlé product.
 

 
In just a few days all of Germany will decide between the Christian Democratic incumbent chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Social Democratic challenger, Peer Steinbrück. (Germans sensibly schedule their elections for the weekends, when people don’t have to deal with workday commutes and so forth.) Merkel is overwhelmingly likely to win, the polls tell us.

Last month the Italian chocolate company Ferrero decided to capitalize on election fever by releasing a politics-themed commercial in order to promote their white chocolate kisses (called Küsschen) that has irritated more than a few observers. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the concept is a little bit like McDonald’s McRib sandwich; the point of the commercial seems to be that the little white chocolate kisses—emphasis on “white” here—will stick around for good, i.e. they’ll stop being a seasonal product. Something like that, anyway. The ad was created by M&C Saatchi.

In the commercial, a package of white chocolate Ferrero Küsschen is giving a political address in a large hall packed with lily-white and faintly Aryan Bürger (citizens). I scoured the commercial for a nonwhite face, but I failed to find any. I say “faintly Aryan” but in fairness most of the people I saw have brown hair—perhaps M&C Saatchi was anticipating the outrage the commercial would cause? It’s pretty creepy either way, it’s just so many smiling white faces.

“Dear friends!” cries the cute little box. “We all have one common wish, to make the country more delicious! We want white Ferrero kisses for ever! And because friendship is no minor matter (kein kurzer Trend ist), we demand—white nut stay! and now everybody: White nut stay!” The crowd chants: “White nut stay!” (In the original German, the phrase is not quite grammatical, and it sounds virtually identical to the sentence “White must stay”) The voiceover intones: “Germany votes white! White Ferrero kisses, now available forever!” As the commercial ends, a poster unfurls reading “Germany Votes White.”

Cue one gigantic facepalm.

Where to begin? For reasons I needn’t detail here, racial purity is quite obviously an extremely touchy subject in Germany—indeed, perhaps it’s a touchier subject in Germany than any other place in the world. Germany since World War II has behaved much better on tolerance issues, but xenophobia is a persistent problem in Europe generally. The depiction of a political rally full of enthusiastic Germans emphasizing the virtues of whiteness—I mean, you don’t have to be Dr. Siegfried Kracauer to detect the uncomfortable symbolism lurking within.

One irritated person wrote on the Facebook page dedicated to the ad campaign, “I hope the advertisers behind this dumb campaign get a chocolate kiss stuck in their throats, and there aren’t any Nazis around to dislodge it.” Ouch. Tahir Della, Chairman of the Initiative for Black Germans, notes that the very fact that this commercial made it as far as the airwaves “shows how subtle racism can be in Germany. It’s recognizable to people who are affected by it but the majority doesn’t catch on so quickly.” He points out that Germany is becoming more diverse but still largely regards itself as a homogeneous country, a dynamic that we also see playing out in the United States, if only in the minds of some of our less evolved citizenry.

Ferrero has pulled the commercial. In an email statement, Ferrero offered the following CYA blather: “It is important for us to clearly stress that we are strictly against any form of xenophobia, right-extremism or racism. . . . All of our assertions were purely about white chocolate—and without xenophobic intent. We regret that the commercial was misunderstood and the product messaging was otherwise construed.”

“Misunderstood,” right . . . it’s really the fault of everyone else who isn’t willing to cut the Ferrero company a break. Ah, how about making a commercial that doesn’t obviously brush up against such sensitive issues?

In an odd twist, the commercial appropriates (not very cleverly, in my opinion) the best-known slogan of the most famous multicultural candidate in the world. In the commercial some of the audience members are holding signs saying “Yes Weiss Can” (Yes, White Can), which is an obvious nod to President Obama’s 2008 slogan “Yes We Can”—but it doesn’t even rhyme or anything, and weirdly mixes German and English. (It should be noted that President Obama is wildly popular in Germany, as he is in most of Europe.)
 

 
via Spiegel Online

 
National Day in Singapore takes place every August. Last year the mint-candy company Mentos released a catchy rap video promoting “National Night,” as in “As a Singaporean citizen you’ll be doing your civic duty if you forget about the condoms after the fireworks and the parades are all overwith. So let’s get fucking, shall we?”

Daniel Lametti of Slate explains the magnitude of the problems Singapore is facing:

Singapore’s birth rate is at a record low. Female citizens of the country now give birth to about one child in their lifetime, a number that used to be much higher. (American women, by comparison, have about 2 children.) According to a video released by Singapore’s government, the city-state needs to produce about 50,000 children per year to maintain its population and avoid the economic calamity associated with an aging citizenry. But the current birth rate is less than 30,000 children per year. To combat the problem, last month the government sought ideas from the public; that’s when The Freshmaker popped in.

 

 
To my untrained ear, the song is mimicking the structure of Alicia Keys and Jay-Z’s massive hit “Empire State of Mind,” and the video is clearly a cheeky copy of Cee-Lo’s massive hit “Fuck You.” Hey, why not stick with the best, right?
 

 
The thing is, though, this song is actually pretty good. It’s jam-packed with clever and salacious wordplay—“Let’s not watch fireworks, let’s make ‘em instead” or “Singapore’s population, it needs some increasin’ / So forget wavin’ flags, on August 9th we be freaking,” and so forth. 

We’ll leave the last word to Lametti. After explaining that baby booms can’t be manufactured by PR appeals, he writes,

Given that the Mentos ad was not commissioned by the government ... it seems likely that the campaign is simply trying to capitalize on a national crisis rather than actually bolster baby-making. Even so, Singapore’s government doesn’t seem to mind; they’ve let the advertisement run uncensored in a country that once banned a Janet Jackson album for “sexually explicit” lyrics.

Well, I’ll be. Check out the video—it’s a lot of fun:

 
via Fluxtumblr

 
In 2009, as part of its “Smooth Originals” campaign, Belgian beer purveyor Stella Artois released three short “classic French movies” that had secretly served as the inspiration for the 1988 classic Die Hard (or actually 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance), the 2002 hip-hop drama film 8 Mile, and the Bush-era TV series 24, respectively.

The tagline is “The films Hollywood didn’t want you to see.” The idea’s supposed to be that all good things were really French first—or Belgian! We aren’t really sure. The movies are a lot of fun though, and have been executed brilliantly, in the manner of dudes like Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and so on. It’s quite a bit as if the people behind Italian Spiderman had decided to turn their attention to skewering Godard’s Breathless (although perhaps after taking some Quaaludes).

8 Mile is transformed into 8 Kilomètres (purportedly une Séléction Officielle at the 1961 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), but instead of a bunch of Detroit homeys swapping rhymes, it’s two affected French beatnik types playing the dozens in a smoky Monte Carlo jazz bistro. The best of the bunch might be Vingt-Quatre Heures (Séléction Officielle, 1964 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), in which the Jack Bauer substitute is a sleepy fellow named Jacques who, informed that “millions of people are going to die” within 24 hours, prefers to peruse Camus’ L’Étranger in his bathrobe rather than save them, because after all, “sauvez le monde, c’est tellement ... bourgeois” (”... saving the world, it’s so ... bourgeois”).

In Dial Hard (Séléction Officielle at the 1963 Festival de Monte Carlo), a foxy chick named “Simone” leads suave “Inspector MeQlain” all over town with telephoned riddles in a deadly game of “Simone Says” (this is the plot of Die Hard with a Vengeance), but the ever-capable MeQlain, who can finish both a novel and a chess game within the same two minutes, decides to make a play for her instead. 
 

 
The full videos and posters for Vingt-Quatre Heures and 8 Kilomètres after the jump…

 
After a couple decades of being primed by the geniuses at Wieden+Kennedy (Nike’s advertising agency of choice for years and years), it was quite a shock to stumble upon these shitty L.A. Gear commercials from the late 1980s and early 1990s and tumble back, back, back into a world in which your parents might have been every bit as into these ads as you were. You can almost hear mom saying, “Now, those sneakers would be nice, don’t you think? They’re so fashionable....”
 

 
More vintage L.A. Gear commercials than you can shake a stick at after the jump…

 
It may be fake, but it doesn’t stop it from being absolutely true.

How One Direction Are Being Advertised In Cardiff

Sometimes the anti-mainstream bandwagon can be just as off putting as ultra mainstream musicians themselves, but not when done as brilliantly as this One Direction poster spotted in Cardiff this week

Allegedly.
 
Via sickchirpse, with thanks to Emma Mullen.
 

Above, Eric Idle, looking like a member of the Cockettes (deliberately?) as “The Comparatively Good Fairy”

One of the least-known Monty Python rarities is “The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971,” a short advertising film that was made for the Birds Eye company’s internal use and then apparently locked away from the public eye (and probably the Python’s, too) until it magically appeared on YouTube.

It’s difficult to imagine what the Bird’s Eye brass would have made of the film back then, but the salespeople would have been delighted, I’m sure. It’s Glengarry Glen Ross meets Salvador Dali, minus all the swearing and macho angst.

“I like all my peas on the plate to be the same size.”

“Why?”

“Sheer stupidity.”

This is the most complete version of “the story they said was too uninteresting to be made” that’s out there.
 

 
United Airlanes is a fake Twitter account representing a fake airline with whimsical, silly, satirical tweets mocking the traditional customer service responses you expect from businesses. Especially ones that suck as much as airlines.

No one is exactly sure who started the @UnitedAirlanes account on Twitter in May 2012, but it seems to be @LeonsBuddyDave from Tumblr.

Whoever you are, I love you.

Some people think they are tweeting the real United Airlines, usually to complain about something. They must have missed the tweets about offering Sky Indulgence points that you can redeem during the Cloud Rapture. Or the tagline that says: “Airplanes are just magic we don’t understand yet.” Or, you know, the (parody) after it.

LeonsBuddyDave posted on Tumblr last week:

“Found out last night that for months, angry customers have been tweeting at my fake parody airline account, United Airlanes, to bitch about their experiences with United Airlines. God has given me a great, beautiful funnel through which angry people flow in the worst possible mood.”

He continued about the possibility of getting into trouble with United:

The most they could really do is make a case to Twitter that my account is either intentionally masquerading as them (or making no attempt to clarify it) and get the account shut down. On the other hand, they might appreciate that I’ve become a lightning rod for hate targeted at them - every tweet @united sends out gets unbelievable vitriol in return.

I just hope they send me a physical Cease and Desist letter I can hang on my wall.

Yesterday he tweeted:

This is your captain reminding you to fasten your seat belts;we may experience some mild turbulence as we surf this sweet tornado hell yeah

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) August 6, 2013

Other examples:

Though oxygen is flowing, the bag may not inflate. If it does, you are inhaling millions of Micro-Spiders and suffocation is now a blessing.

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) August 2, 2013

At United Airlanes, pilots carry less than $20 in cash

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) July 31, 2013

.@stepharoozoo United Airlanes reminds you that DVDs are as sharp as they are archaic, and that cutting tools will be valuable on the island

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) July 31, 2013

@BruPayne @JetBlue No, it's a very serious warning. We accidentally hired bounty hunters to run that desk and now we can't stop them.

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) July 31, 2013

. @iMattThrasher On top of that, there was NOTHING good in your luggage. Who the hell still uses a Zune?

— United Airlanes (@unitedairlanes) August 1, 2013

 
If you haven’t seen this incredible Thai ad for a push-up bra yet, you’re in for a trick and a treat. A totally unexpected and clever marketing approach which I will not explain in detail because… well, you just gotta watch it!