{"id":2445,"date":"2010-05-25T06:40:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T11:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/65.175.102.14\/?p=2445"},"modified":"2013-06-30T18:31:02","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T23:31:02","slug":"north-dakota-featured-in-new-movie-viral-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/?p=2445","title":{"rendered":"North Dakota featured in new movie viral campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the guys at \/film for pointing this out<\/a>, because it’s actually a pretty cool little “viral marketing” campaign for an upcoming movie. This one just happens to feature North Dakota. It all started with this movie teaser trailer:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/center>At the end of the trailer there’s a flicker of film leader that someone took still images of to get the words “SCARIEST THING I EVER SAW.” From there they decided to visit the website “scariestthingieversaw.com<\/a>.” On that website was a simulator for a PDP-11, an old mainframe computer like the ones I used to get in trouble on in the 80s. It displayed a timer, and once the timer counted down certain features were enabled. One of those was to print these two images:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center><\/p>\n

\u00a0Click to view\/download: Image 1<\/a> – Image 2<\/a><\/p>\n

When you print them out, they appear to be newspaper pages from the 1940s that have some hidden features. One of the not-so-hidden features is an ad for Rocket Poppeteers, a popsicle-like treat. JJ Abrams is known to put fictitious foods in his movies and mention them by name, but this one’s getting some prominent treatment. (Yes, there’s a rocketpoppeteers.com<\/a> website, but it doesn’t do anything…yet.) The ad contains a form to mail in to “Become a Rocket Poppeteer and Join the Race to Outer Space!” Where do you send it? Minot, North Dakota.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>Naturally, being the curious sort, I filled out one of these forms to see what might happen. So far, nothing has been mailed back to me. No MIBs have showed up at my house<\/a>, even ones posing as census workers. If that changes, I’ll let you know.<\/p>\n

Why does Minot tie into this? Well, the teaser trailer seems to center around Area 51 and UFOs & aliens. UFO believers have reports of UFO activity around United States nuclear weapons facilities going back for decades, so it makes sense that the movie would include a reference to North Dakota…a somewhat remote, maybe even mysterious to some, place with lots of nukes. The X-Files featured an episode where a UFO was hidden in a hollowed-out nuclear missile silo in North Dakota, so why not take the idea to feature film?<\/p>\n

Being familiar with central North Dakota, the presence of Air Force bases and nuclear weapons in our great state, and the whole UFO conspiracy theory subculture to a degree, I got a kick out of this viral campaign. While I’m not one of the UFO conspiracy theorists, I find them entertaining to watch. It’ll be interesting to see where and how far this movie takes this campaign and how heavily it features our great state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the guys at \/film for pointing this out, because it’s actually a pretty cool little “viral marketing” campaign for an upcoming movie. This one just happens to feature North Dakota. It all started with this movie teaser trailer: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2446,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions\/2446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}