Yet another chapter in which a major corporation postitions itself as the savior of culture against the oppressor. As I wrote previously about Snicker and its clever Webisodes that somehow tried to convince kids that Mars Inc. is the savior of hip hop and youth culture, another caffeinated sugar pusher, Mountain Dew, has created this small semi-interactive universe in which Dew is equated with the elixer of freedom.
As high budget cartoon dystopias go, DEWmocracy is the mother of all corporate cannibals, riffing on the Matrix, The Invisibles, 1984, while managing to include a requisite Native American (with a really bad wig) to tell our skateboarding hero that he is “The One.” Hard to believe, but this bad acting trumps Keanu Reeves. Mountain Dew even includes pseudo participation in which user generated designs can become the next Dew label. Yeah for democracy.
The project also has a bunch of mysterious interrogation videos uploaded to YouTube, by one mysterious seedvideos1234, which is an odd bit of art imitating life given the recent scandal of the alleged destruction of CIA torture videos. But you won’t see the viral videos on YouTube associated with the DEWmocracy site, either because it’s just so bad PesisCo is disowning it, or it’s now too old to be bothered with (I have been sitting on this post for six months– sorry to be so out of it).
Just for fun, here’s an anti-Dew piece that attacks Pepsi for hypocritically advocating corporate responsibility while plastering the city with its ad graffiti.
0 Responses to “Product Placement Planet Pt. 2”