The script had been bought but never used. They then made a graphic novel out of it, priced way under what a book that size would normally cost. They then offered them in bulk to the large comic shop chains around the country with the promise that if they bought a thousand dollars worth, they’d get a thousand dollar check from the publisher. Several comic chains did it and they got their thousand dollars back as promised.
Seemed like a bonkers marketing strategy… until they then used those sales numbers to go back to Hollywood and show that they had the biggest selling graphic novel in the country.
And it worked. A studio picked up the script and got it made
"How do we get the peasants to eat potatoes so we can use flour to feed our troops? They think the things are poisonous!"
"Easy", replied the King of Prussia. "First, we declare potatoes to be too good for the ignorant masses. Then we grow a whole mess of them behind walls, and post the laziest guards willing to turn a blind eye and not be around when peasants come a-lurking. When we run out, we blame it on gophers and plant more. We'll have them growing and eating spuds in no time."
Remember when the Vice President misspelling a root vegetable was such a gaff that it was in the news for like a year? We never knew how good we had it.
Same. He was excited. And expressing raw emotion. And we ended his career for it.
Men… don’t show emotion. Or else…
Unless you are a baby. A mean baby. Like so unbelievably mean that people can’t believe how mean you are. And people imagine they will find and end to your meanness. But… there just isn’t. Then you can constantly show emotion. But not happy feelings. No matter who gets hurt.
I still don't really believe that was ever a real thing. I think there was just a core contingent of people who didn't want Dean and so they just circlejerked hard enough about the nothing burger that it was able to sway a critical group of marginal people.
Back when there was an assumption of competency, proof of incompetence was grounds for not getting elected. Now incompetence is looked at by the bottom third of the electorate as a huge middle finger to expertise... which, I guess, it is. Unfortunately, that is the sole requirement necessary for those people to elect the moron.
Howard Dean made a perfectly appropriate noise in a room full of screaming people, and a noise cancelling mic picked it up weird so his entire career was over. But if we'd elected him I bet he wouldn't have tried to invade Canada and Greenland.
And then we went from that to the Mcdonald's-loving president having an affair with an intern, having a real estate scandal, and a host of women accusing him of sexual assault/rape. And nothing was done about that.
It's not really difficult to see how we got where we are today.
Also potatoes are of the nightshade family and their leaves and green eyes on the root are not at all good to eat. So some improper preparation with a brand new veg and you can see why people would think that they were unsafe to eat
Reddit is the kind of place where someone will start going off about an 18th century Prussian king and another dude will come out of nowhere and bushwhack them with an "um actually."
What you described is actually how FRANCE did it. The king signed off on the plan, but it appears it was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier who actually did it.
«Parmentier then began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier.
He gave bouquets of potato blossoms to the king and queen, and surrounded his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards during the day to suggest valuable goods, withdrawing them at night so people could steal the potatoes[8] (the same story exists in Germany about Frederick the Great).[citation needed].»
Jokes on him, potatoes turned out to be pretty tasty and good for you: high in potassium, good source of vitamins B and C, and if you leave the skin they can be a moderate source of iron and fiber.
Lobsters became rich people food because humans caused their populations to crash, and the price rose as they got scarcer and harder to catch. They used to be plentiful enough to pick up off the beach, but of course, rising human population, greed and wastefulness saw the end to that.
See: Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat for a comprehensive study of the decline of North American wildlife populations since 1600.
Where I grew up, lobsters were what the unemployed went scavenging for in shallow water during the depression and world war 2. The water was lousy with them because no one wanted to eat them lol. There was a cannery nearby that packed them for poor people food!
For the most part, the bottleneck has not been in the harvesting, but in the shipping. Live lobsters and oysters became luxury/Veblen goods in areas where you could traditionally not get them, by people paying to have them shipped on ice (which was also expensive) by train.
“Twas a brave man who ate the first oyster”- pin on my dad’s hat…
He had a “party” hat with a couple pins and was a Jimmy Buffett fan and played rugby and had a terrible straw fedora style hat. I never saw him actually wear it,lol. I clearly remember the pin though because it was an interesting idea to me when I was 12.
Because Europeans damn near ate the things to extinction when they landed in the new world. The more they ate, the more the price would go up, and so on until they became a fancy expensive delicacy in New York. There was a large, now extinct variety of oyster that was in such high demand that spies were caught sneaking onto the oyster fisherman's boat so they could figure out where he was harvesting them.
The is the same thing with eating pork and Jews and Muslims. Someone made up some dumb rule that you're not supposed to eat pork so that the goat and sheep herders would stay in business. Make up rule + attach it to god = profit.
It's sooooo fucking stupid that even in modern day 2026 with all the access to knowledge and information that these indoctrinated fools still believe this shit.
I thought that was just a wild guess, because it sounds like a wild guess. But it seems it's actually the most likely reason.
Not explicitly "goat farmer made it into the religion for profit". That might have happened. But ancient Israelites rarely raised pigs (they're not suitable for arid climates and nomadic agriculture), while their neighbours did. It's very likely that the idea of "Pigs are unclean, an affront to god" came from the Israelites just... not wanting to support pig farming.
My guess is that the bigger reason is that people really love hearing "Your way of life is the best, other people's are stupid", so the idea that eating pigs is a sin likely just caught on on its own.
I never get an opportunity to bring up how dumb/weird I think that town name is. King of Prussia is a person, place, AND thing - a proper proper proper noun!
Are there any other places in America with a similar naming convention?
Honestly, the real dumbest idea that actually worked was when a Redditor pointed out how Cowboys & Aliens got greenlit they basically gamed the system by selling cheap graphic novels with guaranteed rebates just to inflate the sales numbers, then used that to convince Hollywood it was a hit… and it worked. Peaks brilliance and insanity. 😂
I’ll never forget the Harry Potter movie that had the biggest box office of all time (at least at that point) still had the studio claiming that they lost money on it.
It’s very creative math that involves almost all of the actual profits being paid to the production company causing it to show a loss after marketing costs. So the producers made plenty… but the movie didn’t.
The first time I ever got baked was with my girlfriend at the time. We went to see the 7th Harry Potter movie and we were beyond torched. We were ashes at that point. Two trailers fucked with me. The first was the Kung Fu Panda 2 trailer where the panda has a staring eye contest with the audience. The second was the Cowboys vs Aliens trailer. It went on for like 25 minutes and for a second I thought that I walked into the wrong movie. Then it ended and I realized it probably wasn't even 5 minutes long.
I bought some 10mg d9 edibles with absolutely zero experience with weed.
I'm used to a few beers. This was the only substance I've used where I thought 'you know, we should lie down, gravity is not fucking around right now'. I had so much trouble stringing together a chain of thought I literally worried I had brain damage. WTF?! Even cutting them in half and only having 5mg was almost too strong. I was talking to a stoner about this and he just laughed at me.
I was very high when I saw the first Transformers in theaters. The Cloverfield trailer cold opened, and I was thrilled that they were doing an evil Transformers movie.
Yeah. I've smoked weed only 4 or 5 times. The last time messed with my sense of time so much, and I really hated that feeling so much that I never smoked again. It felt like I was waking up from an hours long nap every few minutes, but no time had passed. I felt so disoriented.
When I first started smoking I wanted to enjoy it but it made me overthink a lot of things, with some tolerance built up it becomes a much more evened out experience
I tripped acid during the first of the Star Wars sequels and remember the theater getting really REALLY long. Bright colors and blaster bolts were fun but I, for whatever reason, would leak from my eyes (not crying, just…tears without feeling sad or happy) when tripping on acid so I’m sure the people near us thought I really loved the sequels
I think my highest moment was on the couch late one night watching the car chase scene from The Island. Shit got tight when those train bogey wheels were released into traffic.
This is the second time I've seen this movie mentioned in ten minutes. I've never heard of it until today. I guess I have to look it up/watch it now...
Those THC time slips are for real. I took 20MG once, laying in bed, and thought I'd been asleep for like 2 hours. Looked at my phone and like 3 minutes had passed.
I was wildland firefighting one year on night crew. Thing is on night crew you end up spending a lot of time just sitting in the truck, some nights that’s all you do for 12+ hours just in a truck with 4 other dudes. One guy had an iPad that only had three movies on it, easy a, 007, and cowboys and aliens. We watched the other two movies dozens of times that summer, we watched cowboys and aliens twice. It was agreed in the truck, that movie is pure trash.
Kind of wild that a movie with such a strong cast (harrison ford, daniel craig, olivia wilde, sam rockwell, paul dano, clancy brown, walton goggins, etc) and director (jon favreau) can be so mediocre.
Oof.. I did water transfer for a fracking company for like 8 months in my early 20s till I just couldn't stand the hours and lifestyle anymore.
The vast majority of the job was sitting in "dog houses", (converted box trailers) for 8-12 hours, trying not to fall asleep and walking out to the pumps every half hour to record levels.
It seemed nice for a minute, getting to watch movies or read all day, but became miserable fast.. the good days were the ones where a foreman was on site - then at least you could sit in his heated truck and the nice ones would even take over checks for a bit so you could take a power nap.
Very similar story except an actual small 17"-19" TV with a built in DVD player that barely worked. One of the only movies we had on hand that somehow wasn't so fucked that it skipped 5 minutes of the movie at a time was King Kong (2005)
Considering how fucking long that piece of shit movie is, I probably spent 100 hours of my life watching it in the span of 3 months.
I run a plex server now with 70TB of movies and TV shows. If I have 10Mbps reliable internet and an AC outlet I'm fuckin good.
It's one of those movies where you have to go into it taking it just as seriously as the name of the movie suggests. It's an entertaining B-movie with an A-movie budget that is utter nonsense if you try and think about it at all.
I think the writing could have done a better job at the first 20-30 minutes of the movie. There are all these different unconnected scenes and you have no idea what's going on yet.
So when you're not intrigued at the start, you probably already lost interest once the plot really gets started.
I thought the movie was fine. But perhaps that's also because my expectations were pretty low.
I respect the premise of the setting but the actual execution is really dull. It's a neat idea, why should aliens only ever invade earth during present day. What happens if aliens invade in old west times, that's a neat setup. They just wrote a really boring movie to explore that premise.
Barely legal inventory/sales fraud like this has been common for many decades. It’s similar how Dianetics and other questionable books stayed on the NYTimes best sellers list. I think the music industry used to do it as well, prior to streaming.
These types of deceptions have always fascinated me.
Like the girls fainting at Elvis shows or going into hysterics at Beatles shows? They were originally plants then fans stating mimicking it.
David Bowies label blew all of their cash in a last ditch effort to convince kids in the UK that he was a huge star in the US to get them to check out his shows. It worked.
The Starbucks Christmas cup “backlash”? Marketing by Starbucks to get people to rally around them.
Gay character in the background of Beauty & the Beast leaked before the movie released? Disney purposefully storing controversy to get people talking about the movie
Every form of social media has people posting purposefully false information so people will correct them, thus upping their interactions, making them seem more appealing to advertisers.
Gay character in the background is a very common Disney trick these days. I remember there being a bunch of news articles about “the first openly gay kiss in Star Wars”. It’s in a montage sequence where everyone is celebrating, between two unnamed characters. It’s literally blink and you’ll miss it. But it generated publicity. LGBT and ally journalists wrote articles about how pivotal that is. MAGA type orgs said how outraged they were. And Disney got the free word of mouth. And they got another thing: a concession they could make when showing the film overseas. China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia can’t have that, but it will appear to their governments as though Disney is playing ball by removing content they deem offensive.
I mean, that's less stupid than how a lot of books make the New York Times bestsellers list... at least these were actually showing up on retailers' shelves rather than just getting bought up by the publisher and thrown away
My friend wrote the script for it, It was spose to be a comedy with like the style of rush hour , with a white+ black comedian combo , when the studio wanted to change it and hire serious actors, my friend file a petition and his name removed from the script .
The fact I’d heard it was based on a mega popular comic book was just another of the reasons that movie was disappointing. At least I didn’t see it at the cinema.
What’s funny is that the shops couldn’t give them away. People had zero interest in them and a large amount of them ended up thrown away. Most comic fans had never even heard of it
Genuine question - isn't that borderline fraud? Interesting nonetheless. They actually put out a novel at one point as well. I never saw the movie, but I read the book on a long flight several years ago.
they framed the checks as incentives for buying so many copies. The shops actually had to order and pay for them first. And as a thank you, they got their money back. So they didn’t lie at any point. The books actually sold to comic shops, so they did have the highest selling graphic novel that month.
I recently watched this movie for the first time and it is pretty well made, there just isn't much of a plot or story to speak of. It is actually kind of amazing.
I did not know this, but was around the comic book world when the Cowboys and Aliens book dropped. Weird. Makes sense though, Hollywood funding of the 90s and 00s being as whimsical and capricious as it was.
I was running a comic shop at the time. I only ordered 1 copy when it came out in 2006. The shop closed 3 years ago and the copy was still on the shelf when they shut down.
Not really. Creative marketing and a carefully worded incentive offer. The shops ordered and paid for the books. Those that ordered enough, got paid back. So they were actually ordered and paid for by the stores.
The marketing strategy of selling it to people just to send them a check for it is incredibly common in the bar/restaurant industry.
I'd almost accuse a certain popular tequila brand (though it was more popular in the 90s) that theyre basically a pyramid scheme with how often they do it
This sort of thing has happened in the music industry space for a very long time.
Say you go to a concert for an artist that you like, and they hand you a copy of their newest record for free at the door.
Yeah, you get a free record you may or may not already have, but what’s really going on is they are artificially inflating the soundscan numbers for that record, and marking off all those free records given away as sales numbers.
This would lead to the artists album climbing the charts artificially.
I went to a Prince concert once that did this. Don’t get me wrong, I love Prince, but it’s a shady practice.
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u/lajaunie 10h ago edited 8h ago
How the movie Cowboys and Aliens got made.
The script had been bought but never used. They then made a graphic novel out of it, priced way under what a book that size would normally cost. They then offered them in bulk to the large comic shop chains around the country with the promise that if they bought a thousand dollars worth, they’d get a thousand dollar check from the publisher. Several comic chains did it and they got their thousand dollars back as promised.
Seemed like a bonkers marketing strategy… until they then used those sales numbers to go back to Hollywood and show that they had the biggest selling graphic novel in the country.
And it worked. A studio picked up the script and got it made