TVSquad

Amazing - simply amazing - just how ridiculous this all is. First of all, the fact that they've been up for weeks makes everyone involved in this investigation, top to bottom, a bunch of morons.

Secondly, it's unfathomable that authorities didn't do the slightest amount of research into the matter before responding. I understand how important first response is, but this "crisis" dragged on for hours and hours - you're telling me it took that long for someone to go "uh, sarge? that's a mooninite."

Third, piss-poor media coverage. I've been following this all day here at work, and not once did the TV show a picture of these 'suspicious devices.' There wouldn't have BEEN a crisis if they'd flashed one - once I found a photo on Flickr after the "hoax" announcement came through, half the office said "those have been in philly for weeks." But I guess it's more important to cause a stir and make some headlines on a slow news day than it is to promote a well-informed public.

Crazy how the fire is coming down on Turner networks now for running the campaign - "how stupid do you have to be in this day and age, blah blah blah." No. How stupid do you have to be to not recognize that something that's been in your city for a couple of weeks is completely benign? This could be a case study in mass hysteria - one call comes in about something suspicious, and immediately the operator board lights up across the city.

I really hope that no terrorists were running around planting REAL bombs while authorities were wasting their resources on something that could be so easily and quickly found out and debunked.

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my moms not laughing, 'cause she was stuck in traffic on the longfellow, but i'm in LA laughing my ass off!!
the picture of the thing dangling there just kills me!
maybe the next scare will be a mad cow meatwad...

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Oh, and Bob, there are Aqua Teen episodes on every weeknight, it's been part of the regular Adult Swim schedule for a while now.

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Tucker,

I think you're being a little harsh.

Sadly, in this day and age, you can't be too careful. Someone noticed something unusual, and they reported it. Without knowing what it was, I think the authorities did the right thing. It was daytime, so the lights weren't flashing, so it just looked like a circuit board with some LEDs, batteries and wires. They didn't know whether it was dangerous, so they destroyed it. I don't think Police Officers and Bomb Squad members are actually the Aqua Teen Hunger Force demographic, so I can understand they didn't know what it was supposed to be. How are they supposed to research it? Look it up in the book of animated television characters? I saw pictures of the circuit board on Flickr - there was no sign on it indicating what it was, or phone number to call with any questions. I've seen Aqua Teen Hunger Force several times, but I didn't even know what a Mooninite was until I read it here.

So maybe they did overreact, but I'd rather have an overreaction to a false bomb instead of an underreaction to a real one.

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lol. this makes me ashamed to be from the state of Mass right now. of all the people involved peripherally and otherwise in this brouhaha, apparently no one had ever seen ATHF. aren't there any low level geeks working in the governor's administration?

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I watched this all day and when word came that they were illegally placed (Which they are) Aqua Teen ads I was laughing so hard!

Whoever placed those will be going to trial, they didn't have the rights to put them up. Of course Boston should have had the knowlegde that these things weren't bombs! the media knew that but no one wanted to listen.

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sigh . . . (shakes head) . . . silly people

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"Ya dumb asses"
http://www.rolesor.com

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It's really annoying to me that this keeps getting repeated as a "bomb hoax."


It was never intended to be a bomb hoax! It's a viral marketing campaign!

I agree with everything Tucker said. This is yet another example of a lazy and hype-prone media putting ratings over responsibility.

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Oh yes the media is too blame. I'm sure the media set up the the ads, I'm sure the media called in all the reports of the devices, I'm sure the media made the FBI and police do everythnig they did. yeah the media.

What if this was really a bunch of bombs? Is it that the media plated the bombs! :rolleyes:

Idiots.

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This is one of funniest things I've ever seen. Ever. Right up there with Billy Dee Williams' Colt 45 commercials and Ididocracy.

First of all, the damn thing looks like a modified Lite-Brite. Secondly, I'm just imagining someone completely unfamiliar with ATHF finding one of those things and saying to themselves, "what terrorist organization uses these strange-looking things as its symbol? Maybe, they're bombs from SPAAAAACE."

I mean, yeah, Turner was stupid, and they should have known better, etc. etc. etc. But come on, how could you NOT find this funny? I laughed so hard the neighbors heard through the wall of my apartment.

(And I don't even like ATHF all that much, though I do have the Danger Doom CD, which is great.)

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Doesn't anyone else find it a bit ironic that TV Squad's sister blog AdJab shut down on a day when a viral campaign ruled cable news all freakin' day long?

So where am I supposed to go now to get my advertising jones?

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you've gotta admit, this is pretty awesome free publicity for the movie, money can't buy this kind of exposure so all in all, it was worth all the fuss

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Doesn't anyone else think the marketing people at Turner Broadcasting must have at least suspected that something like this might happen, if not prayed for it? I mean this was absolutely the best possible outcome for the company...the publicity will be unbelievable. The words "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" are now ALL OVER the media. Even factoring in the negative publicity and potential fines levvied by the city of Boston, the company will still come out way on top I'm sure. I can even picture the accounting dept. doing the math "Let's see...possible bomb scare....media frenzy...pissed of mayors...lawsuits...nope, it'll be great, let's do it!"
If that's true, then what they did is so f*cked up on so many levels, I won't even know where to start.

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"Doesn't anyone else think the marketing people at Turner Broadcasting must have at least suspected that something like this might happen, if not prayed for it?"

No. I doubt that anyone at the time would have thought then that a picture of a space alien flipping the bird would be mistaken for a bomb. I'm sure that now however they are giggling their asses off over the incredible publicity this has generated. And Boston, lighten up!

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Ok Everybody let's be seriously rational human beings for half a second. All this is just fear mongering. Look the first guy who saw it should get kudos... He called in a weird thing... once the Bomb Squad showed up this whole thing should have been quashed. There is one thing though you can truly count on in this "Post 9/11" world. The news is no longer the dreaded "liberal media" I always hear/d conservatives rave about. They are going to spread the scariest version of the story possible. Honestly on September 10th 2001 this would have been a 30 second blurb on the news before the weather. The mayor would have asked for an apology from Turner and Turner Broadcasting would announce that they were donating some funds and maybe a park to the people of Boston. Today they want fines and sanctions and some kind of boycott over an advertisement. Turner should have known. C'mon... Adult Swim has made CN nothing but money, Turner lets them have a free pass with anything. I remember getting handed out leaflets on my college campus a couple semesters back from the Adult Swim Street Team. I don't like Aqua Teen Hunger Force... I'm a fan of more of the original Adult Swim shows and the anime but one has to admit that they are likely the only people innovating on television right now. They use viral marketing, traditional marketing, the internet, hell those black bump screens w/ white text are so well known that right before you get into St. Marks Place in the village there was a huge billboard made to look like one next to Cooper Union (an extremely top notch art school). The majority of people are idiots... and they want always for people to dumb things down for them. Sensationalizing the news is going to happen, now more than ever. I hope that Mayor Menino will eventually get over being "killed" in a radio stunt in the 90's and learn that not all media is bad. (Opie and Anthony announced him dead while on a flight so no one could reach him...this was on April Fool's Day) I hope that Adult Swim has their best year ever after all this "backlash" (maybe they'll do more Harvey Birdmans or maybe if the lords of kobol deem it worthy finish the last five mission hill episodes). I hope that the guy who found this thing suspicious be assigned to teach other city workers to keep their eyes open, even if he was wrong in this case. (They've been up for three fraking weeks people). Lastly, I can't wait for the day when the American public decides together to live in the "Post Post 9/11 World".

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So, Ellory, are you saying that we should just ignore these things after 9/11? Potential bomb? Nah, no one would want to attack us. We've only had planes flown into the Twin Towers, 3000 people killed, and, oh yeah, we're fighting a war in Iraq. Of COURSE no one would want to kill us.

When all the terrorists are dead or are so scared of us they won't mess with us, don't talk about a "post-post-9/11 world".

Sarge out.

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David: You, sir, are the idiot. Read the comments again. Nobody is blaming the media for placing the ads. What we are criticizing is the fact that the media did a piss-poor job exposing this to the public. They capitalized on the "OH MY GOD SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES" aspect of the story without doing any sort of research. CNN is owned by Turner for the love of god. Nobody's proposing some CTU-like 'character recognition database', but show a damn picture of the thing. Even if nobody in the newsroom recognized it, they would have been flooded with calls about what it actually was.

Imagine a responsible, transparent media instead of a ratings machine that's now stretching the story into a second day of absurd coverage.

Yes, I agree that the media gets a lot of heat for stuff sometimes, but in this case it's deserved - they blew a matter way out of proportion, and the simple fact is that if they were doing their jobs (researching stories, informing the public, etc) there would have been no "crisis."

And yes, please stop calling it a "bomb hoax" or even a "hoax" at all. It was an ad campaign that was unfortunately misinterpreted by ":rollseyes: idiots."

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OK i am typically not one to blog about anything but this one is just too much. I am a fan of ATHF, I know exactly who Ignignokt is and to me this entire situation makes no sense. But I am an open minded individual and I understand that few of the people I meet that are anywhere near professional have no idea what the hell i'm talking about when I reccite a silly line from Er saying"Yea call us! We'll be drunk!" But that is all besides the point. It is the responsiblity of individuals in the position of authority to reacte to a scare in a timely and organized fashion. This includes a quarantine of the area around whatever may be suspicious or dangerous, but it is also there responsibility to identify the validity of those items as what they really are. I saw the picture and even without the lights flashing on them in the middle of the day it looks like a cartoon character giving you the finger. I really don't think, even if I were oblivious to the show, that I would ever consider that a terrorist group would use such a thing as there insignia on there explosive devices.

And let us go now to the media. Now maybe the birdbrain reporters have no idea what the hell a mooninite may be, but of all the professions, there has to be someone in the pipeline at CNN or fox or any news station for that matter, that recognize the unforgettable shape of a simplistic cartoon character.

Now the usage of "hoax devices" should immediately be dropped from any statement made by ANYONE talking about this. A hoax device by definition is an imitation of an actual device, in this particular instance they are using hoax to mean that they actually are fake bombs when they are nothing of the sort.

I am ex military, not vietnam era either I just got out in 05, and I am absolutely sick and tired of people using 9/11 to justify everything that would otherwise be considered with lack of a better term, STUPID. Bush sent us to war on the same principle, he enacted the Patriot act that allows the US to torture unknown captives and spy on ourselves without any amount of ut from the judicial branch, there is no longer a transparent executive branch, the mass scare tactic of saying 9/11 changed everything truelly needs to be recognized for what it is, the most effective scare tactic of our time. Im from florida and I have my elders telling me how scary the cuban missile crisis was even though they didn't even come close to a real threat


Why can't people accept that you cannot control everything and that the american media needs to be dissolved and rebuilt with the morals and respect of real people and not the shallow and insignificant musings of individuals that really just enjoy hearing themselves talk and having other idiots listen

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Sarge, as a resident of New York City (you know, the U.S. city THAT ACTUALLY GOT HIT BY FOREIGN TERRORISTS), I can tell you that a) most New Yorkers are smart enough to understand the difference between a bomb and a Mooninite, b) the police would be smart enough to research what the hell it is, and c) the local news media wouldn't make it sound as if Bin Laden himself appeared on the Verrazano Bridge.

Be vigilant, sure. But BE SMART. The Boston PD could have easily figured it out and spent the rest of their day doing actual good things. Massive, panic-inducing overreaction is just as bad - in some cases, worse - than ignoring it.

Sam G. out.

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