Kick-Ass is Out Now
Kick-Ass had the all the hallmarks of a masterful Transmedia property. The comics, the fake Myspace pages, the YouTube viral… There were so many places to engage with Kick-Ass, its surprising I knew nothing before seeing @wossy ‘s tweets about attending the premiere and being ‘so proud’ of his wife.
So, my entry point to the Kick-Ass IP was the film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the idea of real people playing slightly crap Superheroes, and have worked on some initial concepts in this vein at Cartoon Network.
But I was pretty disappointed to discover that Red Mists’ crime fighting website – redmist.org – mentioned as a bit of a running gag does not exist. Fail.
These days there isn’t really an excuse for this. If the URL was unavailable, or too expensive, they should have changed the script. If his address was ‘redmist8.org’ it might have even been funnier.
I watched the film with absolutely no knowledge of the background – and the first point I reached out to find out more I hit a dead end.
If the point of the gag was that Red Mists’ site didn’t really exist, there still should have been something there. A fake site for a red headed pole dancer with clever hidden redirects, perhaps?
It’s surprising, as the rest of the Transmedia production is ok. The main giveaway that Kick-Ass’s Myspace page isn’t actually run by the fictional 21 year old is his music taste. Morcheeba? Were they even cool first time around?
yeah. During reading Bret Easten Ellis’s excellent book Luna Park I did some research into his wife in the book (Bret Easten Ellis is the main character of his book) and came across fake imdb and wikipedia entries (she was supposed to be an actress) You could also unearth an FBI file on Ellis. Real fun I guess…..