These are quite old videos that have been circulating in the Internet for quite some time.
http://www.filaki.gr/video/Kinezos.mpg
http://www.filaki.gr/video/Talibolympics.mpe
The first video shows some kind of contest where an asian man tries to catch a huge tree while it is falling.
The second video shows a man diving from the edge of a cliff into a sand pit.
Are those for real? If they are fake, who made them?
No, they are not real. I don’t know where they come from.
Real people aren’t driven into the ground like nails.
I recognize them both. They’re out-takes from real US TV ads. The events themselves are of course fake. The videos are complete, although in each case they’ve editted two cuts into one.
This is all from memory, so I apologize if somebody else can find the 100% true story & it turns out I’ve screwed up the details.
Around 2000/2001 in the US there was a series of about 6 ads containing sequences like this one. As best I recall, the ad series was for a new all-sports cable or satellite TV channel.
They’d show the fake “news clip” from the obscure, 3rd world, weirdly foreign “sport”. Then they’d cut to quick outtakes of American sports (NFL football, NASCAR, etc) while the voice over would be something like “Super-Duper Sports Channel: 24 hours of the sports you care about, not the ones you don’t…”. Then they’d cut back to the fake news clip just in time for the talking head newsreader to deliver his incomprehensible summation of the tree-catching action.
When satelite & cable really started opening up in the US, there were a few channels that didn’t have enough product to fill their time & so suddenly we had channels with Austrailian rules footbal (rugby), occasional cricket matches from Pakistan, Japanese sumo, etc. I loved it, but mainstream red-blooded American sports fans (i.e. rednecks) were not happy.
This ad campaign was a reaction to that trend, the advertiser poking fun at their competitors.
I always liked those ads; a lot of creativity went into the ideas for the fake sports, and they were done well enough that you really wondered just what you were really watchign the first time.
I’m struggling to remember the others, maybe shark wrestling? I think there was one where two outdoorsmen types took turns whacking each other with large caveman-style clubs until one man went down.
They were ads for Fox Sports Net’s Regional Sports Report - the tagline was “Sports news from the only region you care about”.
If you go on youtube you can find most of them by searching for “fox sports”.
Nitpick: Australian football and Rugby are 2 different sports.
Er…what?
Thanks guys for the info. I always came across those videos with the Fox ad cut off. Couldn’t imagine they were fake. They are very well made.