This is tripping me out. I was just going to write a quick post about how terrifically lame I think the outdoor ads for The Day The Earth Stood Still are. It’s basically just a stock-photo image of the Earth’s curvature, against a black outer-space backdrop, with big, block-y, white letters that read: “THEY’RE HERE. WE’RE GONE.”

I keep envisioning some situation where it’s like, they actually had some really kick-ass, slick-style design, and a tag-line that wasn’t written by Tarzan, but it was so high-concept and mind-blowing that it got stuck in endless rounds of focus groups, and approvals and whatnot, and as everyone was scrambling around, the deadline to get the final ad design to wherever it is that billboards and bus-wraps get printed was fast approaching, until it was only, like, minutes away, and finally some executive at 20th Century Fox got some assistant to open up MS-Paint and just slap the thing together, and clicked “Send.”

It’s so unimaginative and uninspired, and so blatant its sheer simplicity actually makes it totally meaningless. 1996 called, it wants its rejected Independence Day poster design back. In fact, so do I Robot, I am Legend, and a bunch of other future/apocalypse Will Smith movies. For that matter, every aliens/robots/zombies/mutants/monsters movie, ever, does too. At a time when our options for global crisis threats could not feel any less extra-terrestrial or non man-made, this just seems so irrelevant. Especially for a movie where the alien looks and talks exactly like Keanu Reeves, and says totally climate-crisis-compliant stuff like, “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”

There! Look! That could have been such a better tag-line. I mean, anything could, really.

This ad is such a boring disaster that no one has even bothered to take a photo of it, or scan it or upload it or anything. It’s actually almost impossible to find any image of its lameness online anywhere.

Almost.

What you CAN find, however, is this:

Right on the heels of my previous post, about the Death Race/alcohol ad “PSA” for “Race,” this one mashes up The Day The Earth Stood Still with 90210, and is just as awesome! Not to mention, packs a message that’s actually relevant in the 21st century.

Well played, billboard mashup artist.

Ps. In the previous post, I was speculating that this kind of thing couldn’t be an accident. I am now completely convinced.

Billboard mashup is so the new street art. Word.