Late last year, we had a lot of questions about Brawndo, the fake sports drink from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, made real by a company called Omni Consumer Products. Among those questions: Why would FOX throw their support behind the drinkable spinoff of a film they were barely willing to release? Is Omni Consumer Products, the company responsible for getting Brando on the shelves, a “real” company, or is it an elaborate Robocop joke? Finally, five months later, Rob Walker answers all those question (and more!) in the New York Times magazine:
[Brawndo] happened not because of a movie-studio marketing brainstorm. (Twentieth Century Fox released the film briefly and without much enthusiasm in 2006 before tossing it to the DVD market, where it has gained a cult following.) It happened because of an Idiocracy fan in Oakland named Pete Hottelet. A graphic designer with very particular pop-culture tastes, Hottelet has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in Robocop. In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).
Read the full story here, or click through for the Times‘ Rob Walker’s attempt to make sense of it all, after the jump.
Invariably the darkly comic sci-fi future is dominated by huge media conglomerates and overbearing corporations that deliver us into some idiocracy or other by force, and from above. But we know things haven’t turned out that way, and it’s now the wily and tech-enabled citizen who embarrasses companies and politicians or becomes a virtual celebrity or — why not? — makes Brawdo a tangible thing in the world.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth