If you’ve ever wondered what happens when id-iom have a little time on their hands then look no further. We’re very pleased to announce our latest video collaboration. We’ve partnered with infamous intergalactic chef and sometime bounty hunter Bhuna Fett to produce this ‘Cooking with Bhuna Fett’ infomercial on behalf of Tesco’s and their new range of Bantha Milk.
We had to do an incredible amount of wrangling to get Bhuna Fett to agree to feature in our video. The amount of brown envelopes stuffed with galactic standard credits was incredible but then again what do you expect from a part time bounty hunter. After we’d paid Bhuna off we only had a 30 mins window in order to get all the footage we needed as he had some other urgent business to take care of.
So here it is. What you didn’t know you’d been waiting for…
With the modest success of a few of our supermarket subversions recently my brain seems to have jumped onto the whole fake ad/culture jamming bandwagon and now it seems I can’t go to the shop without coming up with some new form of contrived nonsense. And today’s offering is a pretty good case in point.
A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was strutting the aisles of my local supermarket trying to locate something they undoubtedly didn’t have when my eye chances upon the full fat milk with the blue lid. And that was all I needed to connect blue and milk and come up with the blue milk from Star Wars called bantha milk. We even see Luke Skywalker pour himself a glass in Star Wars whilst he’s living with his aunt and uncle at their moisture farm in Tatooine.
That was all I needed in the way of a plan so went home and set to work. A couple of parsecs later and I had my label good to go – complete with interview with their sand person dairy farmer on Tatooine. All that was then required was a bottle of milk, some blue food dye and a fake price label and I was good to go.
I can already see the print and TV advertising that would go alongside this new miracle food with a tag line along the lines of “With a few glasses of semi-skimmed bantha in you a day you’ll be strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark in no time.” In fact, that’s given me an idea…
Star Wars: Episode 6 – The Return of the Jedi saw Darth Vader die. Or did it? In fact, he lived on as a cloned version of himself and after retreating to wherever it is Dark Lords of the Sith go to make their nefarious plans he’s back with a new approach to taking over the galaxy.
In Episode 7 Vader’s back with a new shiny pimping costume and a decidedly different approach to galactic domination. Rather than an army of tough-guy clone troopers he’s decided to get himself an army made up of sexy stormtroopers (cloned from his own dead mother!) that he’s willing to hire out to whoever has the most intergalactic credits to pay. Expect to see cards similar to these in a phone box near you some time soon…
This picture was done as a gift for a good friend. Wanna hear the story that inspired it?? Well, here it goes:
There I was with Old Ben just having a quiet drink in a scruffy South London boozer and minding my business when some foreign tough nut walks past and manages to knock the drink out of my hand. After saying something to me i couldn’t understand (I couldn’t even work out what language he was speaking) the man he was with comes over and says that his friend doesn’t like me. And that he doesn’t like me either.
I’m sure they were chatting nonsense but this guy reckons they were wanted men who were not to be trifled with so i promised him i’d be more careful. But that wasn’t enough and he has to go and escalate the situation by shouting death threats at me. At this point Old Ben steps in and tries to chill the situation by saying i’m not worth bothering with – but that isn’t enough for Mr Tough Guy. Realising what is going to happen next i try to move carefully back as things are just about to turn ugly. The rest, as they say, is history…
It’s all true. I swear it!
Cheers
id-iom
Title: Old Ben strikes again
Media: Screen print, watercolour, acrylic, ink and paint pen
I was sat there just minding my own business and having a look through some bits and pieces left on the side in our ‘studio’ (note use of inverted commas!) when i came across an unused R2D2 stencil that was done in advance of our recent Star Wars commission but not used for the final piece. Now, as i had spent the time in creating and cutting the stencil I thought it damned lazy that I hadn’t used it so set about rectifying that mistake as quickly as possible (it was also because we hadn’t got anything on our flickr for a little while).
‘Nobody understands me!’ is the result of that decision and whilst not perfect (but then what is?) I’ve got to say i’m quite happy with the end result (the shadow underneath is probably my main bone of contention). I wasn’t really sure how to give it that little id-iom twist until I thought about how the astromech droids (artoo units to you and me) communicate in their odd little combination of clicks and whistles which, despite the fact that most people in the Star Wars films seem to understand them, are generally unintelligible – and nobody ever speaks back to them in this language (which seems like bad robot design now i think about it!) So then i had a small flash of inspiration – I would have the robot thinking ‘Why does nobody understand me?’ in a completely unreadable text.
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