Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Disney’s Rose Bowl-Winning Ad for “Monsters University”

Boy, would it have been nice if Wisconsin had beaten Stanford in the Rose Bowl yesterday — overachievers with a good sports team are way more annoying than the run-of-the-mill kind. Alas, I have to settle for this highlight: Disney’s sly send-up of the gauzy/clumsy ads each school runs during big-time college sports games.

In case it’s taking you a second or two — the spot is a winking teaser for “Monsters University,” the Pixar/Disney prequel to 2001’s awesome “Monsters, Inc.”

And here it’s worth pointing out that Pixar does a particularly great job with Web promotions for its stuff (see, for instance, its viral-retro campaign for “Toy Story 3”). In this case, the entire Monsters University site is quite clever — note the “edu” suffix.

And we should also note that the Rose Bowl was broadcast on ESPN, which means that either one arm of Disney paid another arm of Disney to promote a movie on super-valuable airtime, or one arm of Disney got free, super-valuable airtime from another arm of Disney. Either way: Powerful arms!

 

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus