The Chaser Are Crowdfunding A New Quarterly Print Magazine, Have A Very #Inspirational Video About It
They're baaaaack.
Comedy group/perennial uni students The Chaser are best known for their various ABC shows and for getting a fake Osama bin Laden within spitting distance of a US President via a phony motorcade, but they got their first real start as a print newspaper.
Running for six years in the late ’90s and early 2000s, The Chaser was a fortnightly rag that gained a stack of notoriety in 2003 when it published then-Prime Minister John Howard’s home phone number on its front page in response to his dismissal of peace protests leading up to the Iraq War. It was the first hint of what would become the Chaser’s long, glorious run of tormenting the PM, eventually culminating in gems like this:
The paper folded in 2005 and the Chaser Annual book series wrapped up in 2010, with the group focusing on TV projects like The Hamster Wheel and The Chaser’s Media Circus as well as running the Giant Dwarf performance space in Redfern.
But it looks like The Chaser are going back to their roots; they’ve just announced a Pozible campaign to fund The Chaser Quarterly, a new publication that “addresses the key problem of our time: namely – there is not enough content in this world.”
“Using a unique patent-pending Content Generation System (‘writing’), our highly trained Chaser Content Specialists (‘writers’), will use bleeding-edge, state of the art technology (‘computers’) to create long-form graphical internet essays (‘memes’), tailor-made for a world bereft of content,” their Pozible pitch runs. They’re shooting for $50,000 in funding, and offering prizes for donors as illustrious as a signed first edition, an Aussie Pride Subscription complete with Green & Gold Card and a full-page ad in the paper, so long as it “fundamentally undermines the product it is seeking to sell”.
And to further convince you to part with your cash, they’ve stitched together this highly #inspirational video promising The Chaser Quarterly will be “everything you want it to be,” complete with generic footage of smiling top-knots and vaguely uplifting music.
So uplifting :’). Check out the Pozible campaign here.