Now you're lost
Lost in the media of it all
Six or so years ago, I had a dumb radio show with my friends at university, where we would discuss obscure ephemera from the dark dingy corners of the internet, from magnet fishing subreddit posts, to ancient html websites dedicated to plotting Bill Gates’ demise, it had it all. One thing we covered a bit, was lost media; films, music, adverts, anything which had a very brief lifespan (if it had one at all), before disappearing into the digital abyss. Sometimes this disappearance was deliberate, as companies purposefully buried embarrassing instances of public failure while other times a simple side effect of the pace at which we now create and consume. This letter is dedicated to investigate the long forgotten…pour one out for the artistic masterpieces we have forgotten about, semi-lost, or lost completely.
Mean Girls on Nintendo DS
What better follow up to the iconic 2004 comedy hit, Mean Girls, than with a tie-in video game for the Nintendo DS? A film that captured the toxic cultural zeitgeist of the 2000s, surely a game for the DS would be perfect to market to high-school aged teens, who love nothing more than to pick up their stylus and play some minigames! And what better time to release it, than five entire years after the film came out.
Noticeably absent from the game cover is of course Lindsay Lohan, who by 2009 (the year the game was set for release in Europe) was struggling with personal issues that were perhaps less ‘marketable’ for a younger audience. She did look cunty in her mugshots though. Nevertheless, the game didn’t really feature the stars of the film at all. In fact it looked like this:
With an art style reminiscent of those mobile ads you get now for games that don’t exist, it’s very much a product of its time. It’s hard to see the connection between the above picture and the Mean Girls film, especially when you see the minigames... But arguably all the best film tie-ins do this; create some other weird semi-canonical entry into the franchise that is only really acknowledged or remembered by those who played it. In this instance though, that would be pretty much no one.
The Mean Girls Nintendo DS game was never actually released. Cancelled at the last minute for whatever reason, very few copies were made and fewer still sold, leaving lost media fans digging through the archives for years to try and scrape together the remnants of this sacred text…UNTIL! In 2021 lost media enthusiast Ray Mona managed to get access to a ROM of the game, after speaking to employees who had worked on it. Due to legal reasons, Mona is unable to share or distribute the ROM and also, the game literally stops fucking working midway through. You can watch a “full playthrough” until the game breaks at least, on Ray Mona’s channel and I’ve embedded it here. It’s cursed in so many ways and while I’m sad I never experienced this first hand, I’m sort of…happy it no longer exists.
The ____ Project
Probably the most influential and easily the most viral horror film of the 1990s, The Blair Witch Project (1999) succeeded in part due to the idea of it being “found footage”, a snuff-adjacent homemade horror left behind by those who had perished in the woods. Horror fans will be well aware of the fantastic marketing campaign that accompanied the project, which propelled the film to be the one of the most profitable films of all time. Missing person leaflets were given out to the public, local newspapers published fake stories about the missing cast and crew and of course the now iconic website channelled millions of visits, genuinely taking up quite a large market share of the traffic on the early days of our beloved world wide web.
Such a feat of guerrilla marketing was bound to be imitated and thus it was. By uh, Cartoon Network and…Nintendo. Just three month after the US release date for Blair Witch, Cartoon Network would release a halloween special titled The Scooby Doo Project, as part of a Scooby Doo marathon on October 31, 1999. Featuring a blend of real camera footage and the hallmark Scooby Doo animation style, the 21 minute sequence features the Mystery Inc. gang venturing into the woods, being haunted by Scrappy Doo and then chased by “just some guy” in a mask.
It’s the dialogue which oddly sets this apart from your conventional Scooby Doo caper, breaking the meta of the show to poke fun at the classic structure of the episodes; Shaggy points out that Fred and Daphne always split up and look for clues together, Daphne hates “the part with the doors” that they always get chased through, Fred riffs on the fact that Velma always loses her glasses, and so on. Each character takes it in turns to call the others ridiculous and it gets quite catty to be honest.
Given the nature of Cartoon Network’s target audience, this halloween stunt likely scared the shit out of a bunch of wee nippers and CN apologised just 23 years later, for some reason.
While this rip-off is fairly well remembered and has been archived successfully, there exists another, equally bizarre attempt to capture the Blair Witch hype…The DK Gorilla Project. Hosted on the Donkey King website between 1999-2000, this attempt was very similiar to The Scooby Doo Project, except it involved a group in the woods finding objects from the Donkey Kong games and ultimately playing Donkey Kong 64 in a cabin. Very little evidence exists of this, besides an archived version of the DK site which makes reference to the videos, some tiny resolution screenshots
and anecdotal forum discussions, making this version of Blair Witch truly lost media. What can we learn from this witchery? Why did these two massive franchises, both with very young audiences, choose to imitate an indie horror film about pagan witchcraft? The answer…is buried in a cabin in the woods.
Walt’s Wisdom
It’s crazy to imagine now, but when Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, it wasn’t exactly a breakout hit. When the first episode aired, it was watched by about 1.4 million people. By comparison, the FX show Sons of Anarchy (which I loved at 15 years old and have been scared to rewatch ever since. Readers, is it actually shit?) hit about 2.8 million upon release. Once Breaking Bad was picked up by Netflix just before its fourth season, the viewership skyrocketed and well, we know the rest. As part of the marketing for the first and second season of the show, AMC made full use of Bryan Cranston’s aura to deliver essentially, an interactive chain mail.
Through a flash game on the Breaking Bad website, viewers could input their basic details - name, location - and get a semi-personalised message from Heisenberg himself. Viewers could then fill in an ugly form and make messages for their friends:
The first video released to coincide with season one, situated the viewer in the midst of Walter’s episode one panic, as the chemist urges the person watching to live their life before it’s too late.
By contrast, a similar promotional video featured on the site prior to the release of season two, marked a distinctly more bald and sassy Walter, who proceeds to threaten the viewer who has mistakenly stumbled upon his cook site. During this one, Walter basically doxxes himself, revealing his life story and his profession to the viewer who is presumably tied up. Odd strategy to scare them off, but it does promote the show quite well I must say. Walt would’ve fit right in taking requests on cameo. I wonder if he also believes the one piece is real.
Tragically, these adobe flash experiences are no longer available to access even using the GOAT Wayback Machine, as I believe the flash plugin itself is broken and potentially no longer supported. Our only remaining evidence of Walt’s pleas is the above YouTube videos from people who were able to save their versions at the time, thank you for your service.
That’s all for now! Weird one this time huh? The concept for this changed about four times and ultimately I have no idea why I was captivated by the things in this letter… but listen you gotta have some B-sides and I got stuck in the mud for ages trying to write something I liked. I’m cooking up some heat in the drafts so I'll catch you again soon. Oh! We also had a screening of The Big Lebowski recently, which fucking banged and everyone who came was very nice and lovely. Here’s a pic of the Rat Depot events team as always, looking tubular.
For our local rats, we’ll be back with a mystery event on September 14th, and then again for a spooky Halloween screening in late October. For my loyal letter rats, I’ll be back soon with some more nonsense.
Until next time,
Love,
Paulie xx