We’ve got a couple real world airplane incidents to report on. The first is this piece from the United Arab Emirates, talk about lax security:

I remember once on a flight from Goa to Europe there was a real, live snake found onboard. The man who brought it on the plane somehow disguised it at security as a belt, and managed to get his pet snake onboard. It escaped his waist on the plane and was found wriggling around the overhead compartments in first class. The plane had to be diverted to land as quickly as possible.

And, while this next one isn’t about snakes, it seems like it could be the makings of a perfectly viable sequel concept:

The scorpion bit David Sullivan on the back of his right leg, just below the knee, crawled up through his crotch and down his left leg, he thinks, before getting him again in the shin. Not what he was expecting on his flight home from Chicago to Vermont.

Yegads. The victim was apparently asked about the film:

He said he hadn’t seen the recent movie, “Snakes on a Plane,” starring Samuel L. Jackson. “I’m pretty selective about what I see,” Sullivan said. “Maybe I have to see it now.”

Yeah, I think you do. You’ll be better prepared for the next time this sort of thing happens.

UPDATE:  For the bored we also have Mice on a Plane and Snakes in a House.

Yahoo’s Health Expert Blog had this to say about the holidays:

That said, if this holiday season finds you alone under the mistletoe, that doesn’t mean your mood has to be lower than the box-office numbers for Snakes on a Plane.

Zing.

Samuel Jackson was shot in the head. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that it couldn’t have done any damage… not to Samuel Jackson. Well, you’d be right. He was shot in the back of the head and is just fine:

Samuel Jackson is walking around with a small caliber bullet lodged just underneath his scalp. He talked exclusively Sunday to WSFA 12 News.

Who fired the weapon and how all of this began is still a mystery. The 67-year-old man went into the greenhouse in his backyard Saturday and picked up a bucket to water the plants. Just before he finished, a bullet came through the greenhouse door.

“All of a sudden, something hit me. It felt like someone just took a board and hit me across the head,” Jackson said. “Of course, I dropped the bucket immediately. I felt my head and I could feel something wet and I said, ‘that’s blood.’”

Snakes couldn’t stop him, a bullet to the back of the head couldn’t stop him. Nothing can stop him.

Mentions of Snakes on a Plane in both the New York and Los Angeles Times today. First the NYTimes is kind enough to let us know that some NBA players is CERTAIN that the situations in the movie couldn’t happen in real life. Second, the LATimes let’s us know that Snakes on a Plane was one of the Ten Moments that Shook the World (in 2006):

No, “Snakes on a Plane” did not go on to challenge “Titanic’s” box office record, but it did become the first studio release entirely championed, developed and, for a time it seemed, directed by film fans on the Internet. The moment when the movie’s cast and crew went back to the cameras for Internet-ordered, gore-boosting re-shoots will go down in history as the first time the Web grabbed the production reins away from movie producers.

Also, Time announced it’s person of the year as “YOU” (referring to me). In reality, I’m a tad disappointed that this site wasn’t mentioned. Clearly this was my ONLY shot to be person of the year… it’s not like I’m going to cure cancer anytime soon. If you can mention LonelyGirl15 a dozen times, surely you can mention me once. Oh well.

I admit I never thought I would type that headline. As you might recall, 50 Cent is famous for having been shot 9 times (non-consecutively?) and, then, I guess, not dying. He’s also been stabbed. Anyway, he’s in an upcoming movie called Home of the Brave starring him, Christina Ricci, Jessica Biel (hey, I went to college with her for TWO semesters) and, of course, Samuel L. Jackson. Mr. Cent was recently interviewed about the experience of working with Samuel L.:

We actually talked about his film ‘Snakes on a Plane.’ And I told him I’m absolutely not goin’ to see that one. Snakes and planes at the same time? It’s a super duper phobia, for that one. He laughed at me, he said ‘all right, I’ll see you at the box office. You’re gonna go see it with everybody else.’

Samuel L. Jackson wasn’t afraid to tell ANYONE to see Snakes on a Plane.

CBS News interviewed Ben from the Church of the Customer about Citizen Marketers. I actually talked with Ben and his associate Jackie for about an hour this summer for a book that they’re working on. If I hadn’t had an exam today, I would have been a show and tell item for them at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit (I bet I would have been a hero over there!).

Anyway, CBS asked him a question about Snakes on a Blog, so I figured I’d post the clip. For easier viewing, here it is on YouTube:

The Today Show is having an end of the year poll to determine which news event was their most “memorable.” Quite the exciting poll, eh? Anyway, one of the ten clips is mine from oh so many months ago (sadly I don’t have the clip online). If you’re feeling adventurous, head to the voting site before 9pm tonight to cast your vote. It’d be really sad to lose to “Dangers at Home,” or “Killer Whale,” or “Dog Hotels.”

I guess I wouldn’t mind losing to “Halloween Costume Trends.”

UPDATE: I lost to the Killer Whale.  Comme ci, Comme ça.

You see, when this sort of problem gets posed by the New York Times, nobody ever considers the snake factor:

Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

The weird part, (ignoring the total lack of snakes in the scenario) is that people seem to think the plane is able to take off without air passing over the wings, which is totally impossible, right?  Anyway, I’m sure throwing a few snakes onto the plane, or even the treadmill runway, would dramatically alter the math involved.

Hey, I’m like a marketing flog now, neat eh? Here’s New Line’s press release regarding the soon approaching release of the DVD version of Snakes on a Plane. Posted because it says a decent amount about what’s going to be on the DVD, if you haven’t already read about it somewhere else:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sit back. Relax. Enjoy the fright.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON FLIES THE

NOT-SO-FRIENDLY SKIES AS

Snakes on a Plane

SLITHERS ONTO DVD JANUARY 2, 2007, FROM NEW LINE HOME ENTERTAINMENT

Never-Before-Seen DVD Bonus Features Include Audio Commentary from Samuel L. Jackson and Director David Ellis, Deleted Scenes,

a Behind-the-Scenes Documentary, a Gag Reel and the

“Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” Music Video

LOS ANGELES, CA (October 2, 2006) – Fasten your seat belt for some pulse-pounding turbulence! There is no escaping the venomous bite of Snakes on a Plane as the year’s pop culture phenomenon creeps onto DVD January 2, 2007, from New Line Home Entertainment. When deadly snakes are released onboard Pacific Air Flight 121, an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson; The Man, Star Wars Trilogy,) must protect the passengers before they become the creatures’ prey. Directed by David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2, Cellular), this edge-of-your-seat action-thriller also stars Julianna Margulies (TV’s ER, HBO’s The Sopranos), Bobby Cannavale (The Station Agent, Shall We Dance), Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live, Fat Albert) and Rachel Blanchard (Without a Paddle, Road Trip). Buckle up for chilling DVD extras including audio commentary from Jackson and Ellis, deleted scenes, a behind-the-scenes documentary, a featurette documenting the film’s fan-based buzz, the “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” music video and more! The DVD will be available at a $28.98 SRP.

Read the rest of this entry »

This came out about two months ago, but I somehow missed it. My network of spies has grown, understandably, smaller as of late. The Editing Room takes films and rewrites them to cut out all the filler, boiling them down to just the bare essentials of the story. Their take on Snakes on a Plane is pretty funny. Here’s a part:

NATHAN PHILLIPS I’m so nervous about testifying against a crime boss. What if he tries to kill me?

SAMUEL L. MOTHERFUCKING JACKSON Don’t worry, I’m here to protect you, just like when I rescued you from those thugs in your hotel.

NATHAN PHILLIPS Actually, I’ve been wondering about that. How did those bad guys find me? For that matter, how did you find me? Nobody saw me for more than a second, and you weren’t even there.

SAMUEL L. MOTHERFUCKING JACKSON Umm…

Whoa, watch out Manilla!  I know you’re ready for all sorts of crazy antics out there, but nobody was expecting Snakes on a Plane.  Oh, well, ok, at this point, I guess they probably are expecting that, but it’s funny nonetheless.

Philippines airport authorities on Tuesday foiled an alleged attempt by a Filipino woman to smuggle more than 100 poisonous snakes and lizards to Thailand.

An airport X-ray technician reported seeing the image of a snake inside one of two large suitcases allegedly belonging to a woman, who came from the central Philippine city of Bacolod on her way to Bangkok, Thailand, said customs officer Tessie Roque.

The two suitcases were later opened, revealing dozens of soft drink and water bottles and sacks containing 50 monitor lizards, 39 cobras, 21 vipers, 20 other smaller lizards and two iguanas.

Give that technician a medal.  I wonder how many ounces of liquid are in a snake?  I also wonder how those two iguanas survived with all those other, more bite-y, things in the suitcase?

The Hartford Courant has a weird piece up entitled Bipartisanship is Bliss, Dear Senator which has the following throwaway comment:

I have been working on an abstract piece comparing the turncoat seditionist Lamont to the movie “Snakes on a Plane” because in each case there was a lot of advance hype but not that many people showed up.

Sounds, uh, odd.

The New York Times Magazine ran a piece today entitled A Turn of Phrase based in part on an interview I had forgotten that I gave. It goes on to discuss, in what I thought was actually a fairly interesting and insightful manner, the disconnect between Snakes on a Plane the film and Snakes on a Plane the phenomenon. As time goes on, people will likely forgot about this whole experience, but if anyone is going to learn a lesson about marketing and the link between the internet and the real world, this whole interlinked experience between product, promotion and ownership should be considered.

The people online owned the joke of snakes on a plane. New line owned the movie Snakes on a Plane. Both had the same origin, but both ran independently. Because someone was interested in one, didn’t mean that they would necessarily be interested in the other. And just because the internet is full of chatter, doesn’t mean that the real world is full of the same level of chatter. It’s a lot easier to be loud on the internet (see, for example, me) than it is in the real world.

There’s an excellent point about three quarters of the way through the Times’s piece:

New Line didn’t get a free ride from these creators; if anything, the creators got a boost from New Line: The movie promoted the hype more than the hype promoted the movie.

It’s true. And it certainly worked out to my benefit. However, after the movie opened and people were disappointed by the box office numbers, I had intense, but inexplicable, feelings of guilt. Clearly it’s not my fault the movie did less well than they had hoped it would do, and I had no real bearing on its financial outcome (nor had I ever tried to have any bearing on it), but yet I was somehow linked to this film. It’s success would have been my success. It’s failure turned out to be my failure.

In the interviews I give, I point out that there’s little about Snakes on a Plane that could be replicated by future entrepreneurs. Things become viral when they’re genuinely engaging. When they are something that’s so good that people feel the need to pass them on without being told to do so… just because. The problem in trying to create something like that is that you’re ALWAYS trying to create something good enough that people want to engage with it. That’s ALWAYS the goal. You can’t try to make something extra good so it will go viral, you should have been doing that the whole time. The problem with Snakes on a Plane was that what was viral was not the movie itself, but the idea of the movie. The concept was the joke… the movie was almost irrelevant once the title had been pitched.

Ok, enough blathering. Here’s the picture the Times included with the piece drawn by some guy named Leif Parsons:

Also, if you’re bored, there’s also some discussion of the New York Times story going on over at AltHouse.

A man who turned his basement into a sanctuary for wayward snakes blames Snakes on a Plane for the public’s preference for cats and dogs over snakes.   The venomous fangs, for some reason, don’t get mentioned.

Ok, well, not really.  There’s no direct connection between Borat and Snakes on a Plane.  Borat is made by Fox, not New Line.  Borat is about a foreigner, not snakes.  Borat stars a British comedian, not Samuel L. Jackson.

What they do have in common, however, is underground appeal.  And Fox seems as though they’re trying to rectify some of the perceived problems with New Line’s handling of Snakes on a Plane:

Fox had hoped to open “Borat” in more than 2,000 theaters. Instead, the film will start in about 800 locations, then expand to 2,200 the following weekend when Fox hopes the movie will have gained traction. “The movie plays like a concert,” Snyder said. “It’s great in a theater.”

…

The movie also could be suffering from what one executive called “Snakes on a Plane” syndrome — buzz that peaks too early. After a year of Internet hype, “Snakes” had a disappointing opening this summer for New Line Cinema. Still, that movie was being hyped sight unseen, whereas critics have raved about “Borat.”

“It’s gotten a lot of publicity, but publicity does not necessarily equal an audience,” said analyst Brandon Gray, head of BoxOfficeMojo.com.

BoingBoing thinks so too:

But all that’s changed now. And between Borat’s MySpace hijinks, the tons and tons of looks-like-homemade promo videos… this is the first big-studio movie to really nail online viral promotion perfectly. How smart was Fox? MySpace, which Fox bought for $580 million, doing online street promotion for Borat, a Fox property… this is no “Snakes on a Plane” accident.

Will Borat succeed beyond the financial success of Snakes on a Plane?   (Ha, even BoxOfficeMojo thinks SoaP is like Borat.)

Snakes on a Courtroom? No, wait… that’s not right. Snakes on Toronto? No, that can’t be it. Snakes on a New Home? Not quite. Hamsters on a Plane?!?!? No, that’s definitely wrong. Snakes on a Plane! You knew it was coming, didn’t you?

It’s actually a shame that the Snakes on a New Home article is the most interesting (and SnakesonaPlaneesque) one:

Snakes fell on Lyman Hepworth’s head when he opened the door to a pump house near the small house the couple planned to buy.

“When it warmed up, we walked onto the yard and the whole yard moved,” Jeanine Hepworth told the Rexburg Standard Journal.

One day, Lyman Hepworth reached to turn on a light and discovered the pull cord was actually a snake.

Yegads.

Ok, one has to wonder: when’s my movie?

Me and the One Red Paperclip guy are in a deep, DEEP competition, only he doesn’t know who I am or care about me in any way. So I guess he wins. He got a house in Canada, all I got was a trip to a movie premiere.

Who wants to live in Canada, anyway?

Yuck:

Are “Snakes on a Plane” really just “Snakes on a Plane?”

In a post-9/11 world, it’s not likely.

Eh:

I think the best 9/11 movie is probably Snakes on a Plane, with its fantasy that we could just have Samuel L. Jackson snarl the terrorists into submission.

Here we go:

“It has never once made me think twice about getting on a plane. Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m not afraid of flying. I’m more afraid of snakes on a plane.”

The Sioux City Journal chimes in:

There are three types of people in the world: People who don’t get “Snakes on a Plane;” people who get “Snakes on a Plane;” and people who get “Snakes on a Plane” but don’t want it.

…

Asking yourself if you’re going to like an R-rated movie called “Snakes on a Plane” is like looking at the nutritional statement on a double bacon cheeseburger. If you have to ask, you don’t want to know.

In other news, there’s apparently a Congressman from Iowa named Steve King. Do you think he was elected exclusively on name similarity? I’m voting for the next candidate named Samuel L. Jakeson.

We’ve had a few real Snakes on a Plane stories before, but here’s a new one. Well, it’s old, but it’s new to the Internet. Gary was kind enough to let me know about an incident he had back in South Africa:

We really did have a snake on our plane!

Whilst living in South Africa, my dad had a Piper Cherokee 6-300d. We landed at a grass strip outside Kenton-On-Sea where we had a holiday home.

A few days later as we where taking off from the runway, my dad the pilot noticed a loose green wire hanging from the dashboard. As he reached down to grab it, it moved. He made an emergency stop, and everyon board made a hasty evacuation. My Gran (who is 100 this year) witnessed the spectacle as we leapt from the plane.

And he was kind enough to send in a newspaper clipping from the Sunday Times from around January 18th, 1977:

And, in unrelated news, the Dallas Morning News ran a story listing all of the real Snakes on a Plane incidents they could find. Neat.