Turn off that Mobile!!
There are few things more annyoing than mobile phones ringing during a movie in the theater (or a live performance for that). But it seems to be human to forget to turn these cute little phones off before entering, movie theaters nowadays need to remind their patrons kindly before the actual movie starts with an on-screen anouncement. Several years ago some clever marketing specialist got the idea to provide the theaters with an attention grabbing announcement featuring the stars of an upcoming movie and such promoting the movie. In the meantime especially animated features make use of this concept – just off the head I remember such trailers featuring the stars of “Robots”, “Open Season” as well as Disney’s “Brother Bear”, the latter with the moose talking on the phone. In fact my local movie theater even continues to use some of these older trailers / announcements after the movie has long gone and seen a DVD release. When I went to see “Eragon” a few days ago a new trailer / announcement was used …
… featuring the swinging frogs from the upcoming animated Disney feature “Meet the Robinsons”! It’s a great trailer featuring the frogs performing a swing number telling the audience to turn of the mobiles, not kick the seats in the row in front and not chew their popcorn loudly. Really great – our whole group talked about it afterwards, unfortunately noone but me remembered that it was connected to “Meet the Robinsons”, so maybe a few more regular trailers should be run as well.
If you haven’t been treated to the special trailer / announcement Walt Disney Pictures is now also offering it online on YouTube for repeat-watching. Let’s hope that the trailer / announcement will be included in a future DVD release – just as it was done for the (non-Disney) “Robots”.
By the way: on the special “Meet the Robinsons”-YouTube-page you can also find the tv-ad that was aired during the Super Bowl for the movie. Super Bowl tv ads are among the most expensive on the market and are in fiercy competition for the attention of the audience, which frequently leads to some of the year’s best ads being produced specifically for this one time use only. The fact that Disney did book an expensive slot for a Super Bowl ad for “Meet the Robinsons” clearly indicates that it is willing to promote this animated feature further, even so recently it had been observed that the Disney PR machine wasn’t yet rolling full speed.
