Beyond the Billboard

A Dummy's Puppet's Ramblings - from Chip Martin, Mannequin American

Progressing Beyond the Billboard

Technology is transforming old-fashioned billboards into tools that are far more interactive.  Today billboards change color or shift shapes, bus shelters interact with mobile phones and URLs drive eyes from a poster to a Twitter stream or Facebook fan page.

The Blue Man Group provides good examples of how traditional billboards can be replaced by a variety of 3-D montages. The Group often uses life-like replicas in humorous situations to attract attention.

Even our own Leslie Brown got to interact with a Blue Man replica in Las Vegas.

The Other White Meat ... Sue Me

I like pork. But the National Pork Board (NPB) has once again gone out of its way to make me want to seek out other meats.  I dislike any association or company that is without a sense of humor. I try to avoid them and their products.

The ever-vigilant NBP is out to put an end to the sale of Radiant Farms' canned unicorn meat. (If you want to go back and re-read that sentence, please do so.) It's not because they want to stop the slaughter of the one-horned flying horses ... it's because they say the product infringes on their "other white meat" trademark. You gotta be kidding me!

The unicorn meat in question is actually a fake product dreamed up by resident geeks at ThinkGeek.com for April Fool's. But the site's listing for the product read "Pate is passe. Unicorn -- the new white meat," and that was enough to bring out the Porker's legal cease-and-desist team. The Pork Board lawyers put some effort into their 12-page letter to ThinkGeek, prompting the site to issue a humorous public apology:

"It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn. In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity."

As usual, the group without a sense of humor ended up generating way more attention for the group that it attacked than ThinkGeek would ever have gotten on its own. I think that's called "Karma." To appease the Pork Board, ThinkGeek has now changed the slogan for Unicorn Meat to "Caviar is so 1980s. Unicorn is the sparkling, crunchy, savory meat of today's elite."

Officially Our Best-Ever Cease and Desist (ThinkGeek.com) is a link to the hysterical response to the NPB's Cease and Desist.

A Non-Offensive Pin-up Calendar

A hilarious and ingeniously appropriate promotional calendar targets physicians with different x-ray images for each month. It's part of a marketing campaign for high resolution medical imaging monitors on behalf of Eizo of Germany, a company that supplies high-end monitors for the observation and subsequent diagnosis of radiographs (x-rays).

The idea is so good that the calendars have been making the rounds of marketing blogs around the world.

More photos here. Ingenious.

Ventriloquism Provides Plots for Books, Comics and Movies

Ventriloquists and ventriloquism frequently make their way into the plots of movies, books, and comics. Movies like "Magic" with vent figure Fats and books like "Goosebumps: Night of the Living Dummy" with the puppet Slappy, tend to dampen legitimate vent business for short periods. 

But we always seem to bounce back. Besides, I know Slappy and he's a nice Mannequin American. Fats is as spooky and obnoxious as you'd expect him to be. I think he drinks.

Here's a picture of Dale standing next to a replica of Fats. Sorry I don't know the name of the young man holding Fats, but trust me, the replica is as spooky as the original.

Putting $ Where Your Mouth Is

After our lecture at the International Ventriloquists' Convention, we sold out of our recently revised "Putting Money Where Your Mouth Is ... How to Get Those First Paying Jobs as a Ventriloquist." But the books are now back in stock and available on our website. Just click here to go to our store.

Cool Comic

The Dell comic above shows Donald Duck using a parrot to help make his puppet talk. If you happen to have an original of this comic from the 50's, you're in luck because it's a very rare collectors' piece. (Call me. I know someone who would be happy to take it off your hands.)

If you run into other references to ventriloquists, pass them on to me. I'm always eager to find opportunities to make Dale look like a weirdo.