Musicians Chime In For NBC Jingle

You may not know that the notes to NBC’s famous chimes are G, E, and C, but chances are you’d recognize the Peacock jingle in an instant. With that in mind, executives at the network decided to have some fun with their famous chimes and launched a national campaign calling for a 21st century reinvention of the 75-year-old television staple. To help drive the point home, NBC solicited some of its stars, including The Office’s Jenna Fischer and Heroes‘ Masi Oka, as well as a handful of music luminaries who filmed individual eight-second spots entirely of their own creation.

The music-themed promos were shot in Los Angeles last week, featuring T.I., B.B. King, Bon Jovi’s Richie Sambora, The B-52’s, country star Clint Black, and the always eccentric Flaming Lips, who let EW.com sit in on their two-hour shoot atop downtown L.A.’s now vacant Park Plaza Hotel for this exclusive video. Naturally, the band’s noise-assault interpretation of the chimes was out there to begin with, but what really blew our mind was frontman Wayne Coyne’s tricked-out double-neck guitar, which, as a jab at rhythm-game obsessed kids, featured a twist on the Guitar Hero plastic axe. Watch for the NBC promos to start airing around Thanksgiving.

Obama HOPE Poster Parodies

Artist Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama HOPE image we’ve seen so much during the current presidential campaign, writes:

“Check out this link to a plethora of parodies of my Obama HOPE poster. I’m very happy that the HOPE poster has become such a point of reference. One parody that is not included is something I consider a high point in my career for pop culture recognition. Mad Magazine’s new cover is a spoof of my Obama image. I loved Mad as a kid. I think Mad’s satire heightened my understanding of irony and hypocrisy. I’m very excited to be a part of Mad’s history.”

 

Google Earth Comes to the iPhone

Google Earth. On the iPhone. That is, I would imagine, all you need to know to send you careening off to the App Store, from where you can grab the free download of Google’s Aerial Opus.

 

What’s surprising about this iteration of Google Earth is the speed at which it runs. A few years back my Mac notebook (an iBook) struggled to run Google Earth without glitching. This version speeds along at a fair clip, although a bad data connection will certainly slow things down — like the desktop version, the application is constantly streaming data from the web.

 

The iPhone niceties you’d expect are here. Pinch to zoom, twist to, well, spin the map. This should be a boon for German tourists in Barcelona, whose over-accurate maps depict the coastline as running on a diagonal, just as it is in real life. This leaves locals baffled when helping the Germans out with directions — all our maps reference the sea as “down” and the mountains as “up” and sticks the blue strip of water straight across the bottom of the map, throwing everything off by an innacurate – yet easier to use – 45º.

 

Tilting the iPhone will tilt the horizon and you can then use a finger to “throw” the landscape below you. There’s also a compass in the top right corner which moves as you spin the maps. And of course, the app can find you using the location functions of the iPhone.

 

The app lacks a lot of features of its big brother: No road markings, for example. But results for both Wikipedia and Panoramio pop up — an easy way to find places of interest nearby. Go try it. It’s free, and fun. (From Wired.com)

 

Make Your Own Muppet

This may very well be one of the best holiday gifts ever!  

Ever want to see yourself in Muppet form? FAO Schwartz is offering the chance to do just that with their Muppet Whatnot Workshop. For a mere $90 you can design your own muppet, to be delivered to your doorstep in just a few weeks.   Check it out HERE.

Neil Gaiman Talks About Coraline And More

In 1989, Neil Gaiman created a little comic book called The Sandman, and, along with esteemed colleagues like Watchmen’s Alan Moore, slowly and inadvertently created a pop culture phenomenon that still has fans snapping up his graphic novels almost twenty years later. Since then, Gaiman has put his pen to work in an astounding number of media, from more graphic novels, to children’s books, fiction, TV, and film. Though Neil is currently on tour promoting his new book The Graveyard Book, which he is doing by reading a chapter per location and posting the footage in its entirety on his website, he squeezed some time into his schedule to talk to Premiere.com about the big-screen adaptation of his novel Coraline. The film, which comes out in February 2009, is a stop-motion, stereoscopic three-dimensional extravaganza adapted and directed by The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ Henry Selick.  Read more of the interview HERE.

Free Tacos Tomorrow

When Will The Fruit Burst

If you’re the kind of person who likes to sit at the computer and watch absolutely nothing happen, you could do worse than visit WHEN WILL THE FRUIT BURST?, a promotional Web site for Cadbury Pascall fruit chews. The site tracks the progress of an actual billboard in New Zealand featuring a giant fruit balloon full of Fruit Burst chews that’s been placed next to a giant pin. As the balloon fills with air, it moves closer to the pin, and we laypeople can place bets on when it will pop … and hopefully not scar a large swath of downtown Auckland with chewy shrapnel. (Reprinted from AdFreak)

 

 

How Google Got Its Colorful Logo

In just a few short years, Google’s logo has become as recognizable as Nike’s swoosh and NBC’s peacock. Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand. Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor. Page and Brin, who were having trouble coming up with a logo for their soon-to-launch search engine, asked Kedar to come up with some prototypes. “I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude,” Kedar says.  Read more HERE.