There are so many.
I will open with Let It Be.
Open air unannounced rooftop concert by the biggest band ever.
Thoughts?
Balloon boy was a nice one to follow. Go get a bottle of Hot Damn! from the liquor store, a six pack of beer, and stay up all night, discussing the moral failings of the Heene family online and why they’re guilty and deserve punishment. That a was a good week. Whatever happened to those screwballs? They’re so yesteryear.
I’ve seen the Heenes a couple of times on “World’s ‘Smartest’ Inventions”. Someone really needs to get that guy off whatever he’s ramped up on.
Here’s one of my favorites: SurvivaBall, dsigned to provide a post-global-warming survivable environment for the airwaves.
The same people responsible for SurvivaBall have done a shitload of other extremely successful pranks. My favorite is when one of them conned his way onto the BBC as a spokesman for Dow Chemical, claimed that Dow was going to sell off Union Carbide and put the $12 billion onto assisting the victims of Bhopal chemical spill. Supposedly, Dow stocks lost $2 billion in value in the first 20 minutes after the guy was on the air.
" We do whatever we want, to whomever we want, at all times. Moonitines Unite! Lock in!"
Back in 1992, New York governor Mario Cuomo was contemplating running for president. There was a lot of speculation about what his decision might be.
One day, in Albany (the state capital), a billboard went up saying, “Run Mario Run!” Nothing else.
Commentators were speculating about who put it up and what group was pushing him to be president.
After a week, the billboard was amended to be an ad for the new version of Super Mario Brothers.
Ah yes, the Boston police that can’t tell a Lite-brite from a bomb, (or a breadboard with a couple of LEDs on a girl’s sweatshirt from a bomb.
To be fair about the Boston bomb scare: This was shortly after 9/11 and two planes originated from Boston, so we were sensitive.
Taco Bell offered free tacos to everyone in America if a piece of Mir hit the target they towed into the ocean. I thought that was quite funny.
Yeah, 2007 was only like a month or two after 2001.
And the Pearl Harbor sneak attack probably explains my lackluster Hawaiian vacation in 1998.
Didn’t the “Lite brite” fiasco happen shortly after 9/11? If not, my contention about Boston’s sensitivity wrt 9/11 stands.
Lee Taylor killing himself.
Some of Stalin’s show trials of the 1930’s were terrific theater.
And Joe McCarthy put on a great show until overwhelmingly poor reviews shut down his act.
How could I forget the single greatest publicity stunt in the history of the world, as documented in Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl --the 1934 get together by you-know-who and a half million of his closest friends.
I’ll throw out a personal opposite. Lamest local stunt ever. Back in my hometown when I was a teen we were suddenly inundated with billboard ads (and I think TV, radio and newpaper ones as well). Things like “What is X?”. “X is coming to town!”. “X will be here soon!”. “X will make you blow your wad with joy” (well not the last one).
People got a bit interested as well as hopeful. Were we getting a zoo? A sports team? A water park? A new mall? A good business that would bring jobs? Was Ted Turner moving to town? Sure sounded like something halfway decent was going to happen.
Oh hells no nothing worth a shit happened. After all that build up the big reveal was the local gas company was reorganizing and renaming itself “X”. And to add insult to injury, everybody that used gas from this quasi monopolistic government business paid for all that stupid shit advertising.
The Yippies throwing garbage bags full of dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock exchange, from the visitors gallery. Wherein the traders on the floor broke into complete pandimonium!
To this day, there is caging up to prevent such a thing ever happening again.
And, of course, the attempted levitating of the Pentagon, for which the White House promptly called out the National Guard. It did produce some of the most iconic photos of the 6o’s however, the hippies and the soldiers smiling together, and the flower in the end of a gun, shot.
The 60’s were a great time to be alive!
A few years ago Vanish ran TV ads where people would be yelling to other people to “hurry up, the new Vanish ad is on!!” and people asking other people “did you see the new Vanish ad?” and falling about laughing.
It was very very clever. Sadly their regular ads are a bit rubbish really
Kim Kardashian’s wedding. A year or so of getting a bajillion dollars in free gifts and sponsorships, an exclusive deal for airing the event and then weeks (if not more) of free publicity a couple weeks later when she divorced. And her show is still going strong and she’s still getting paid to stand around at events and look pretty in loaned gowns & jewels so she made out like a fox in a henhouse.
My favorite is from 1842 by the father of the publicity stunt, P.T. Barnum. The Fiji Mermaid The man was a master of this art.
Ain’t America Great! Only place in the world where you can have a well-paying job just going to parties and clubs.