Indian Kid With Big Head, Huge Smile Dances For TiVo in Weird Video
We've seen this at least three times at different web addresses but passed it off as just a freakishly weird video but now the video contains a TiVo status bar, sound effects, closing copy and logo. And, it now lives on the website of San Francisco-based Swivel Media lending more credence to the marketing angle of the clip. The video (an old Bollywood film) features an Indian-looking family sitting on a bed with an old-school boombox. The Dad turns the boombox on and off as one of the kids (or...dare we say, dwarf with a big head and freakishly weird smile), standing on the floor in front of the bed dances robotically, starting and stopping as the Dad starts and stops the music. Freakishly weird but additively entertaining.
We contacted our friend Erik over at Swivel Media to confirm (yes, shockingly, we do that sometimes) this is, in fact, another weird promotion for TiVo and Erik tells us, yes, Swivel did create it in the sense they latched on to popular and strange clip and branded it with TiVo. We say another because in mid-September an odd, 50's-style video surfaced called Blue Moon in which scientists found a Tivo and thought it was some sort of alien (the kind from other worlds) device.
Comments
Wait, I thought this was just some weird clip from a botched "Bollywood" production. I remember seeing a fight scene from the same movie on either break.com or youtube.
yes this is from a real movie, anyone know what it is? They cut out more of it for the tivo commercial.
Yeah, it was appropriated by Swivel, they didn't seed it. Just opportunists. And it's not a kid or a dwarf, he's a midget. And they're not a family, just neighborhood kids. And the song playing is "Holiday Rap" By DJ Sven and MC Miker. And I am a big dork.
I usually hate to be a stuck up pedant, but can't help point out a few things.
Firstly, the ad ain't a TiVo thing. It's a clip from a Tamil (Indian) movie. This clip recently became the most viewed clip on Yahoo. I blogged this here
Second - Indian movies aren't bollywood. There are other alphabets out here in the land of the snake charmers.
Third - as Charlie pointed out - this is no family. That's the superstar Rajnikanth lying on the bed in all his style-ishness, and these are his cronies.
Fourth - just so this comment gets through and all, I've been subscribed to Adrants for an insanely long time and love you folks. Keep it coming.
Oh, sorry. Forgot about the dancer-dude's (dwarf) name. He's called King-Kong here in Tamil Nadu
Thanks Ravages. It is being tuned into an ad by Swivel though. This has been confirmed. And thanks for definig who the "family" is. I just said that becasue that's what it looked like to me.
Oh, ok.
Hi...This was a working copy of a concept that resided on Swivel's site only. They absolutely saw the opportunity to leverage a hot property that happened to show some of the positive attributes of one of their clients. We love this ... this is what's called lightening in a bottle :)
Opportunity and Relevance are often the same thing, and this is one of those things you can't stop watching. It's non-optimal that this got out, since we were kicking it around internally, but hey, you know what they say about the cat and the bag. :)
LOVE IT !!!!!!!!! Planets aligned, and it happened to benefit the client. We had concepted this as a result of the genius of Pete in our art dept. I guess the client will be happy to see all of the attention. I have a call with them tomorrow. Hilarity at it's finest. I love this job.
ROCK ON FOREVER
Erik hauser
ewww, too many "creator" people talking and not enough ranting. that RK guy is a huge bigshot and hopefully he gets to sue the pants off TiVo. Oh wait, this is not Hollywood. This is Tollywood. Or was it Mollywood?
But grudging props to TiVo for some insanely slick leveraging, even though its a bit late in the online fame game.
ewww, too many "creator" people talking and not enough ranting. that RK guy is a huge bigshot and hopefully he gets to sue the pants off TiVo. Oh wait, this is not Hollywood. This is Tollywood. Or was it Mollywood?
But grudging props to TiVo for some insanely slick leveraging, even though its a bit late in the online fame game.
ew: Kollywood is Tamil. Tollywood is Telegu. Mollywood is Malayalam. (I know, it's crazy)