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What we’re watching: The rise and fall of Theranos is getting a lot of renewed interest recently, what with a HBO documentary and a podcast out. Via Vox:
Modern grifters and con artists manifest a certain vampiric quality. The hipster grifter, fraudulent socialite Anna Delvey, the fake Saudi prince, Fyre Festival (and maybe, if you squint, even college admissions fraud) — they all have one thing in common: A sexy, alluring cast to the con that makes the feeding off the (metaphorical) blood of the conned even more seductive to those of us sitting on the outside, munching popcorn as our eyes widen.
So perhaps what makes the story of Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes so compulsively interesting is that it’s the rare double grift, subtext and text: Holmes, who promised that technology her company had supposedly developed would change the world of medical testing forever, fed the con through sucking the metaphorical blood of wealthy people’s bank accounts and through, well, actual blood. Even the poster for Alex Gibney’s upcoming HBO documentary about the fallen entrepreneur, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, boasts some ominously vampiric undertones.
Theranos turned heads with its signature invention — a blood testing machine about the size of a home breadmaker named the Edison, after Thomas and (perhaps in a stroke of dramatic irony) the many failures he endured en route to success. The Edison would have, by all accounts, radically shifted how we approached health care. The vials and vials of blood required to run medical tests would be reduced to just a “nanotainer” of blood, drawn from a prick on a fingertip. The nanotainer would be deposited into an Edison, and thorough analysis could be run inexpensively, quickly, and seamlessly. All at your local Walgreen’s.
Dora the Explorer has a live action film, to absolutely nobody’s surprise. What we didn’t anticipate is that it looks like YA Tomb Raider. Via Polygon:
The live-action Dora the Explorer is not the Dora the Explorer you knew. A first trailer for the late-summer movie explains it all.
The hit Nick Jr. show premiered in 2000 and lasted until 2006, making it one of the longest running Nick Jr. shows of all time. It followed a plucky 7-year-old Latina girl named Dora and her monkey companion Boots, and eventually a spinoff centered around animals and Dora’s cousin Diego aired as well.
The live-action adaptation of Dora sees the little explorer all grown up, about to take on the scariest adventure of her life: high school. Dora’s life is anything but mundane, however, and soon she leads a group of teens to rescue her parents and discover the mystery of a lost Inca civilization. The trailer shows off Tomb Raider-style action and adventure — Dora pulls out a knife! She has a knife!
Oh what, Danny Trejo is the monkey? Along with Eva Longoria and Michael Peña in the film, this is shaping up to be a great show. We’re looking forward to it. Apparently it premieres in August. Hopefully Australia picks it up too…
Colonel Sanders is the Godfather of Chickentown in this vaguely threatening, weirdly hilarious KFC (UK) ad which points out knockoffs. Via the Drum:
KFC has launched a campaign that reminds the public that there is only one place to get the Colonel’s Original Recipe.
Created by Mother, the spot sees the original chicken Don, Colonel Sanders, hit the streets of the UK.
As he cruises down the street in a big red saloon, with the Godfather theme (in this case, a specially-commissioned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Love Theme by Nino Rota) playing over the action, the Don spots chicken imitators along the way. As he heads down the chicken shop road, neon-lit chicken shops appear before him, from ‘QFC’ to ‘Lip Lickin’ and ‘Houston Fried Chicken.’ The ad hints that the chicken pretenders are just an imitation of KFC and won’t be able to match its ‘iconic’ taste.
After hand-breading his iconic Original Recipe chicken, the Colonel drives away and we’re reminded that KFC chicken is only available at KFC.
Discussing the new campaign, KFC UK’s chief marketing officer, Meghan Farren said: “It’s flattering to have this entire legion of imitators, and we wish every chicken shop out there the best of luck.
“But there’s nowhere else you can get the Colonel’s Original Recipe. We invest time, effort and skill into freshly hand-breading Kentucky Fried Chicken in our kitchens – all day, every day – and that’s why you can only get KFC at KFC.”
Hermeti Balarin, partner at Mother added: “There’s only one colonel in Chicken Town. And his name is Harland Sanders. Capice?”
Fox is celebrating its “fresh start” with this ad campaign, after that mega-merger Disney-Fox $71.3 billion dollar deal finalised. Via Deadline:
“The company that we knew and loved is changing,” says a prophetic Terrence Howard tonight in a clip from Empire used in sizzle spot celebrating the birth of a new era at what is a slimmed down and new Fox. Running during the latest episode of theLee Daniels and Danny Strong co-created hip hop drama that is one of Fox’s all time biggest hits, the one-time only 90-second “new chapter” video was full of big names and big shows from the network’s more than 30 year history. “This is a now or never opportunity,” proclaims Beat Shazam host Jamie Foxx in the mash-up of The Simpsons, sports, unscripted and some past and current faves like Empire, 9-1-1 and Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville.
Airing with that typical Rupert Murdoch flare for promotion, the spot (watch it above) for the now Charlie Collier run Fox Entertainment comes just hours after the mega-merger Disney-Fox $71.3 billion dollar deal became a Hollywood game changing reality this morning at 12:02 AM ET.
Or as the sizzle spells out: Get Ready For A Fresh Start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGrSw7wK4no
Walmart’s epic “Famous Cars” commercial features a ton of iconic movie cars from the Batmobile to the Delorean from Back to the Future. Can you ID them all? Via Syfy:
Set to the ’80s-era jam of Gary Numan’s “Cars,” the one-minute ad shows some of genre’s most famous vehicles (including the ones we just mentioned), like Ecto-1 (Ghostbusters), the Mystery Machine (Scooby-Doo), the Batmobile, a yellow VW Beetle (Bumblebee), Lightning McQueen (Cars), and one of the Jeep Wranglers from Jurassic Park, converging on Walmart to pick up groceries that can now be ordered online. […]
“We not only picked “famous cars’ from iconic movies we knew would be instantly recognizable to our customers – and launched the campaign during one of the film industry’s most popular awards shows – but we also worked with a variety of different Hollywood studios to gain access to these vehicles,” wrote Barbara Messing, Walmart’s chief marketing officer, in an official release. “This helped ensure the ‘famous cars’ looked just like what our customers knew from the films, while demonstrating the ease, speed and convenience of the service – and that it’s for everyone, regardless of what car you drive.”
During the commercial, we get glimpses of Scooby (very excited to get his Scooby Snacks), the gluttonous Slimer (basically the mascot of the Ghostbusters franchise), and the small Compies that killed Peter Stormare’s character, Dieter Stark, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQGL37mLfsw
The Encounter by Pepsi is an ad parodying/paying homage to the science fiction film The Arrival. It played during the Golden Globes. Via Variety:
William H. Macy has spent hours playing characters in such TV and film works as “Shameless,” “Fargo,” “The Cooler” and “State and Main.” He appears for just seconds as a surprisingly resourceful janitor in a commercial for Pepsi.
Sometimes, the actor says, advertisements can have just as much power as programming.
In a 60-second spot that aired Sunday during NBC’s presentation of the Golden Globes, Macy plays a savvy working man who appears to thwart an intergalactic invasion by offering alien interlopers a bottle of Pepsi. “I’m a fan of commercials,” the actor says in an interview with Variety, noting that doing voice-over work once gave him enough financial freedom to act in Chicago and off-Broadway. “I’ve seen a commercial do more in 60 seconds than a film has done in two hours.”
Pepsi is betting that Macy’s advertising philosophy resounds with consumers in 2019. The beverage giant, a regular sponsor of big sporting events and TV moments, not to mention the Super Bowl, plans to put more emphasis on commercials meant to entertain big audiences, according to Todd Kaplan, vice president of marketing for colas at the company – so entertaining, executives hope, that viewers will forget the commercial isn’t the exact thing they tuned in for in the first place.
ICYMI: A very special performance of “I am Australian” partly translated into the Mabu Yawuru ngan-ga language, sung by schoolkids. Via the ABC:
This music clip features iconic Aussie anthem “I am Australian” which was originally composed by Bruce Woodley AO and Dobe Newton and originally performed by The Seekers. It has been specially recorded for the ABC by almost 400 students from Broome Primary School, who sang it in Yawuru language and featuring kids from around Australia.
The ABC would like to thank the Mabu Yawuru ngan-ga language team and Yawuru Traditional Owners of Broome for providing the translation of the song “I Am Australian” and for assisting us in the making of this video.
“The Best Stories are Yours” was produced in-house by the ABC MADE team. External Director, Brendan Fletcher was engaged to direct the work and long-term audio partners, Uncanny Valley were engaged on musical arrangements and vocal recordings.
This was part of the #ABCYours campaign. As the ABC’s funding gets cut more and more over time — it has among the least funding of public broadcasters around the world — it’s nice to see that beautiful campaigns like this can still get made. With the ABC’s funding indexation about to be frozen for three years, it remains to be seen which services will get cut.
Apple pushes its Privacy and Security functions in its latest ad, pushing its IOS with a “Privacy. That’s iPhone” campaign. Via the Verge:
“If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on,” says the commercial, as it flips through a wide range of privacy-related scenarios, including “keep out” signs, people avoiding eavesdroppers at diners, window locks, curtains, and padlocks.
It’s a similar approach to the massive billboard that Apple bought at CES 2019 earlier this year, declaring “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone,” in a veiled shot at competitors like Google that were presenting just across the street.
Of course, there’s also the timing of Apple’s new privacy-focused ad push to consider — just a few weeks after the news broke of a huge FaceTime bug that would allow anyone to listen in on calls made through Apple’s platform. The incident has since been patched, but it was undeniably a black eye for the company, one that Apple seems eager to put behind it with this new campaign that looks to reinforce that privacy is still a big priority.
The FaceTime stoush was pretty bad: it involved a bug involving Group FaceTime. Users had to turn off the FaceTime ability in their iPhone while Apple took a while to fix it. Given the bug, this latest ad seems a little ironic to say the least, but at least it’s kinda funny.
Niantic is following up its viral smash hit game Pokemon Go with a Harry Potter game this year. Expecto crazy crowds of people again. Via Kotaku:
Pokémon Go developer Niantic and WB Games just gave us our first in-depth look at the gameplay for their next augmented reality game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, slated for release sometime this year.
From the screenshots and videos Niantic dropped today, it’s immediately apparent that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’s beta looks a lot better than its Niantic predecessor. The character models’ graphics seem well-detailed, and the spells looks pretty damn good so far.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’s gameplay doesn’t split players into teams as of now, Eurogamer reports, but they can choose one of three classes: the Magizoologist, the Professor, and the Auror, which, respectively, are good at taking down magical beasts, understanding the intricacies of magic, and spell-casting. Everybody is a member of a group of top wizards called the Statue of Secrecy Task Force, which aims to neutralize evildoing “artefacts” from around the world. […] Those Foundables will function basically like Pokémon in Pokémon Go—players must hunt them down down in the game’s augmented reality, but then, instead of catching them, players will destroy or neutralize them with spells.
ICYMI: Leaving Neverland is a four hour documentary by HBO (available on Tenplay if you’re in Australia) about 2 of Michael Jackson’s accusers. Via Vox:
Nobody wants Leaving Neverland to exist. That much is clear.
In HBO’s two-part, four-hour documentary, which airs on March 3 and 4, Wade Robson and James Safechuck discuss in painful detail the molestation they say they experienced at the hands of pop superstar Michael Jackson when they were boys. The film is not the first time Jackson has been accused of molesting young boys — in 1993, a lawsuit against him was settled out of court. And in 2005, he was acquitted of similar accusations in a criminal trial that was prompted in part by the 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson, in which the singer held hands with 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo and talked about sharing his bed with children.
In both court cases, Robson testified in court on Jackson’s behalf, while Safechuck defended him to investigators. But now, both men say that Jackson molested them as children (and both have tried to sue Jackson’s estate before, in cases that are under appeal). This is the first time the allegations have been so detailed and presented in such an unrelenting fashion. And the response has been deafening from those who would defend the deceased singer. Leaving Neverland prompted swift backlash from Jackson’s estate and fans after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The estate is now suing HBO for $100 million, presumably hoping to prevent it from airing.