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Porsche enlists Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter
Porsche enlisted Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter (aka Bill & Ted) to promote their new electric powered sports cars. There is so much to unpack here.
I suspect Porsche wanted to target gen-xers (and more likely early millennials) with a mid-life crisis. They probably wanted something that was memetastic.
While I am in the right age group, I am not necessarily in the right income bracket, so I am not their target market. From my perspective, there was some interesting choices.
Bringing in Alex Winter alongside Keanu Reeves was to signal that this isn’t about the ‘cool’ Keanu of Point Break, The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2077 or John Wick. Instead its closer to the ‘Dad cool’ of Apple executives – not really cool at all, but it might be fun.
The film itself is shot in a style reminiscent of Top Gear, even going as far to feature former Top Gear US presenter Tanner Foust.
This didn’t make Porsche feel like the luxury good that it is. It didn’t make it aspirational to own a Porsche. And I think that’s a problem.
Netscape
Netscape Navigator was the first internet browser that I used on a regular basis. This happened whilst I was at college. There were a few other browsers SpyGlass which was bundled with some internet services (and eventually Microsoft Internet Explorer) and NCSA Mosaic. The word in the college computer lab was that Netscape Navigator was the one you wanted. My first copy was bundled on a floppy disk sellotaped to the front cover of MacFormat magazine.
This video goes into the rise and fall of Netscape.
TeamLab
Experiential agency TeamLab have come up with an amazing experience in central Tokyo sponsored by TikTok. It is held at the Rinkan Sauni in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Goddess of Spring
Disney’s Goddess of Spring is set to classical music like Fantasia. It was designed as a short and the study used these series of short films to experiment with animation techniques. This episode of ‘Silly Symphonies’ was the first time they had experimented with human animation. The techniques are gone into more depth here.
MacOS X
The modern Mac operating system is 20 years old this year. I remember getting it to run on the iBook laptop that I owned back then. MacWorld have put a potted history together on how the modern Mac operating system came into being here.