Month: September 2012

AZTEC THEATRE

egg council creepTwo years ago, I enlisted you, the reader, to go forth and locate the egg council commercials that the classic “You’d better run, egg!” scene from “Homer the Great” was referencing. Well, reader James e-mailed me with the news that he located two of them (maybe the only two?) on AdForum.com.

I can’t embed the videos so you’ll have to click the links:

Here’s a minute-long commercial featuring an egg being sent to the electric chair.

And here’s a 30-second one that starts the same way, but features different types of eggs.

A couple observations: the eggs are noticeably shorter than the guards, and they have no legs; they’re not normal-sized people cosplaying as eggs with normal legs like the Egg Council creep. Secondly, the brand is “California Egg Commission,” not the Egg Council, which appears to be made up.

Boy it feels good to finally have closure on this pressing issue. Thank you, James.

WHAA...?!

duff beerAccording to the French Simpsons site The Simpsons Park, the French networks W9 and Canal + have been blurring Duff Beer in Simpsons reruns. Why? Because a German brewer somehow won a trademark dispute with Fox and now they can legally sell Duff Beer, complete with a logo completely ripped off from the show. Although Fox had two Duff Beer trademarks filed in the European Union, a Belgian court annulled them “because they weren’t registered for an actual beverage” (the German brewer, Duff Beer UG, has applied for their own trademark, which takes a lot of chutzpah). And now that Duff Beer is available in France, French TV has to blur Duff Beer because advertising alcohol is apparently illegal there, and showing this fictional beer that’s been around for over two decades could be seen as an advertisement for this insane rip-off beer that brazenly stole its name and logo and has nothing to do with The Simpsons. Europe is weird.

MY TWO CENTS, WEB-WATCH

Three big Simpsons fansites have gone offline just in the past month or so. Normally, I’d be ecstatic that three of my competitors have been knocked off in one fell swoop, but instead I’m perturbed. Is someone picking off Simpsons fansites? Who could it be? Why are they doing this? And who’s next?

Back in the late 90s, Simpsons fansites were a dime a dozen. Some, like the character sites, had their niches, but most were pretty generalized, meaning they had a little bit of everything: some character bios, episode guides, some .WAV files, some grainy framegrabs that would occasionally rouse Fox lawyers into sending threatening letters to teenagers, maybe some fanart and reviews, and ever-popular “grabpics,” which were framegrabs that were traced over in Illustrator or something and put on white backgrounds. But as time went on, webmasters grew up and moved on, the show got steadily worse, the dynamics of the internet changed, and the number of sites dwindled. That number dwindled even further this month as three Simpsons fansite fixtures met their frosty fate.

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