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Topic: Oh, the huge manatee! (Read 1879 times) |
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Hermit
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Re:Oh, the huge manatee!
« Reply #1 on: 2006-11-14 16:58:24 » |
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Thank you for "Saving the Manatee!"
Do you remember [ Church of Virus BBS, General, Creative Endeavors, Hermitish Poetry, "Driven to Drink", Hermit, Reply #8, 2002-03-15 ]
Your image and my poem seem somehow to belong together...
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
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Re:Oh, the huge manatee!
« Reply #2 on: 2006-12-13 02:28:23 » |
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A manatee joke on television becomes an instant hit on the Web
[Hermit: First the Humanity. Then the Huge Manatee. Now the Horny Manatee. 3 Million Hits. Oh the Huge Money Treetm (we Missed).
Now weep at the serious price paid to "buy the licence" to the URL! 10 years through register.com.]
Caption: The TV interviewer James Lipton doing the manatee dance on Conan O'Brien's show. Elizabeth Margaret Claffey (NBC Universal)
Source: International Herald Tribune
Authors: Jacques Steinberg
Dated: 2006-12-12
External Links: A Manatee Dance
The skit, as scripted for the Dec. 4 installment of the talk show "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," was about absurdist sports-team mascots that the host and his writers would like to see someday.
Among them were something that O'Brien called "the Webcam manatee" — said to be the mascot of "FSU" — which was basically someone in a manatee costume rubbing himself or herself provocatively in front of a camera (to the tune of the 1991 hit "I Touch Myself"). Meanwhile, a voyeur with a lascivious expression watched via computer.
Who knew that life would so soon imitate art?
At the end of the skit, in a line that O'Brien insists was ad-libbed, he mentioned that the voyeur was watching www.hornymanatee.com. There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC television: if a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name and then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could conceivably be held liable for appearing to promote it.
In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the show but before it was broadcast.
A week later, by Monday afternoon, hornymanatee.com — created by O'Brien's staff and featuring images of supposedly forbidden acts like "Manatee- on-Manatee" sex (again using characters in costumes) — had received about three million hits, according to NBC. Meanwhile, several thousand of O'Brien's viewers had responded to his subsequent on-air pleas that they submit artwork and other material inspired by the aquatic mammals, and any romantic and sexual shenanigans they imagine, to the e-mail address conan@hornymanatee.com.
Reached by telephone at NBC on Monday, O'Brien said he was stunned and overwhelmed by the viewers' response to what had initially been a throwaway line and by what that response suggested about how the digital world was affecting traditional media like television.
"We couldn't have done this two years ago, three years ago," O'Brien said. "It's sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience."
Regardless, O'Brien and his staff are digitally savvy enough to seize an opportunity when it presents itself, particularly in the aftermath of Internet comedy phenomena like "Lazy Sunday," a filmed clip from "Saturday Night Live" that drew large audiences on the Web last year, initially as a bootleg clip. After the taping of the Dec. 4 show, O'Brien said, the show's executive producer, Jeff Ross, informed him of the problem, then asked him whether he wanted to mute the mention of the site or buy the Web address.
"We didn't want to take it out," Ross said, "so we bought it."
O'Brien said he knew he was on to something by Wednesday night when he was at a Christmas party in the lobby of a friend's building and a waiter approached him with a platter of salmon and toast points. When O'Brien politely declined, he said the waiter drew in close and whispered in his ear, "My compliments to the horny manatee."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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