Great Watchmen News Program-Viral Marketing at its Best!

If you haven't heard, the legal troubles concerning the Watchmen movie have finally been settled... So the original release date of March 6th is still on! Hurray for timely disappointment! Anyhow, a short week after the legal troubles were settled, this "authentic" news program from the Watchmen universe's 70s appeared on the net. And its pretty cool-check it out for yourself! One more note, we commented in an earlier post that the shot of Doc Manhattan disassembling the tank looked pretty cheesy... well it looks considerably better on deteriorated film on 70s era video.

Gotham Central References In Dark Knight Viral Material

Newsarama recently reported that a new Dark Knight viral website has launched, an online edition of The Gotham Times. This fake newspaper is startlingly detailed and features four pages of full-length articles, most of which focus on the aftermath of the events seen in Batman Beyond. There's plenty to enjoy, but most surprising to me were a few references to one of the most critically acclaimed Bat titles in recent years, as well as a personal favorite of mine; Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka's crime series, Gotham Central.

The evidence after the jump...

There's a Letters to the Editor section on page two, and the second letter (titled "Major Letdown?") is about the formulation of the Major Crimes Unit, the branch of the Gotham City Police Department that Gotham Central focuses on. This by itself might not be a direct reference to the comic, but the next example is more explicit.

On the front page, there's an article titled "Dent Tip Line Targets City's Dirty Cops", which reports ib how ADA Harvey Dent is launching a campaign against corruption in the GCPD (apparently it's "dividing the city" in half). In the continuation of this article on Page 3, the fifth paragraph down contains a list of cops that are under investigation for corruption. Included are Jim Corrigan, Roger DeCarlo, and Timothy Monroy.

Roger DeCarlo and Timothy Monroe (presumably misspelled as Monroy) are a team of dirty cops featured in Gotham Central #32, in which they haphazardly kill a runaway girl only to find out she was under the protection of Poison Ivy (d'oh!). Jim Corrigan should be a very familiar name to Gotham Central fans (as well as old-school fans of The Spectre but let's disregard that for now), as Corrigan was a crooked CSI officer and one of the series' main villains.

As much fun as it was to spot these references, I'm not sure if their inclusion mean much. The list of corrupt cops includes a number of other names, and everyone on the list including those I mentioned can be found on the GCPD Police Roster on Wikipedia. So either the writers behind this paper are really up on their Bat-history, or they're just handy with Wiki research. Either way, seeing Gotham Central characters mentioned in the context of the new movies rekindles my hope that the old rumor about Renee Montoya making a cameo will be true. Don't play with my emotions, Warner Brothers!

Rorschach's Journal: Fan Prank, Viral Campaign, or Both?

It's been around since the web was born, but that "highlight for hidden text" trick never gets old. We recently saw it used in the "I Believe In Harvey Dent" viral campaign for The Dark Knight, and now a similar gag on "Rorshach's Journal", which appears to be a cryptic promo site for Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie. The site is just the one page as seen above; clicking on the graphic links to rorschach@rorschachsjournal.com.

Now about that hidden text...it's written in Morse code, and according to the commenters at iFanboy.com, it's displayed several different messages throughout the day.

Detailed analysis of all the alleged secret messages after the jump, plus some surprising discoveries...



10:35am: "Stood in street. Watched it burn."

This is a line from Chapter VI of Watchmen, page 25. It's from Rorshach's narration as he describes torching a dress warehouse with a kidnapper inside.

11:am: "You remind me of Weatherbee. I don't like you."

Now this is interesting - I thought it was a commenters joke at first, but someone else verifies it. This is a line from Chris Sims' hillarious Archie/Watchmen mashup, posted on Chris' Invincible Superblog. The comic can be seen here, but here's just the relevant panel, with a bit of context. It doesn't seem likely to me that an official viral campaign would reference something so obscure, but the parody IS awesome, so maybe they're just really going for indie web cred.


UPDATE: We contacted Chris Sims himself, and got this response:

"I actually saw it posted on some LiveJournal today and I thought the same thing--that a commenter was making a joke. But then, it became abundantly clear that the people on the LJ had no idea who Weatherbee was, let alone your ol' pal Chris Sims. You're the first person to email and let me know, so I can only assume that somebody involved with the making of the site either

a) Is a "fan" of mine and thought it'd be a funny reference, or...

b) Did it by accident, thinking it was an actual line from Watchmen.

Now that second one might sound unbelievable, but when Kevin Church did a parody of Watchmen re-lettered with Stan Lee-esque dialogue (called, appropriately enough, Just Imagine Stan Lee's Watchmen), the images ended up being used in some documentary about comics. I think it was on the history channel."

1:14am: "Maybe you've forgotten how we do things..."

Checking my copy right now to see if it's in the book...sounds like something Rorschach would say to Dan Dreiberg. Any Geekanerds out there who know off-hand where the line is from?
UPDATE: Found it. Fourth panel of page 10, Chapter 10. Is indeed Rorschach talking to Dan Dreiberg, as they get ready to "Visit Bars. Squeeze People.", in pursuit of the mask-killer. It tips Dan off on a mini-rant about how hard it is to be Rorschach's friend, leading to that super awkward handshake.

UPDATE: 2:22pm, June 30th..."Kitty Genovese was the start". Chapter 6, Page 10 - the line doesn't actually appear, but this is when Rorschach talks about how the Genovese case effected him.

As pointed out by the iFanboy commenters, the site can also be viewed at http://staff.theonering.net/xoanon/rorschach/index.html, leading some to speculate that this is either a prank headed up by www.theonering.net, or the site's collective has been hired to help with Watchmen's official viral marketing. Mysterious! Who watches the pitchmen?

Read about the continuing Journal updates HERE and the revelation that the site is unofficial HERE.