Monday, December 11, 2006

WEINER BOY

Hey, speaking of Craig McEwen, in the early to mid-nineties, he and I had a company called Weiner Boy. We wanted to make cool music videos, live show visuals, audio soundscapes, commercials, etc. We started to collect stock footage and various sound recordings etc. We decided the best way to promote ourselves was to give millions of stickers away to anyone and everyone. Our logo and the rascally weiner mascots were designed by Geoff Coates--in fact Geoff did everything you see here with the exception of the salty old sailor.


Craig and I loved these two hellions! Everyone loved these buggers! Everyone loved WEINER BOY! They'd take the stickers and laugh and feel good. Things were going great for our new little venture and things seemed like they were on the up and up! A few weeks later, after handing out millions of these stickers, we started getting phone calls. But they were not good phone calls. The voices on the other end were angry and venomous!

"YOUR STICKERS DON'T STICK!
WHAT KIND OF FLIM-FLAM DADGUM
OPERATION YOU TRYIN' TO PULL?!?!"


Craig and I needed a quick fix, and QUICK! We decided that we'd need to do a re-release of the stickers but this time on a stickier material. Craig and I went out in full-force with our new batch of stickers:


Sticker collectors the world over are paying top-dollars for the old unstickable stickers and I've heard rumour of some being appraised at about $24 with peel-back backing still intact and about $12 - $15 without. Although the RCA sticker (seen below), was printed with the new stickierable material, they are fetching upwards of approx. $25,000 - $32,000 each (with the peel-backing still intact) because only 50 of these were printed and Craig and I each donated our own blood into the ink which was used to print these. We would have printed more but we were running out of blood and feeling light-headed. We promptly went to the bar and gave them all away.

Keep on truckin'!

Paul Boyd's take on Weiner Boy

Along with the sticker campaign, Craig and I produced these amazing fliers.


I love the Your reputation is 'INSURED' intentional typo. Craig and I then went on to create a fictitious history of Weiner Boy promotion (click on the images to enlarge):


Months after releasing these out to various places, Craig and I saw a Tab Cola commercial where an eccentric German exiles himself via a weiner-shaped zepplin. He disappears without a trace until many years later he is seen roaming the wilderness in the Pacific Northwest (where they use the infamous Patterson footage). It was trippy, hilarious, weird and very familiar.--HEY I FOUND THE COMMERCIAL:



Here is our first demo reel. It consisted of the stock footage we were collecting, some sound bites, footage from our first music video and some stuff from college film school. It was made using the Dvision TOASTER just before non-linear editing systems started to take over the galaxy.

click the hard-workin' gaffers for demo reel (05:31 - 12.5 mb)

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