Why The Marketing For Anchorman 2 Needs To Stop

I stumbled into the first Anchorman film having never seen an ad for it. 2004 was a simpler time. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were still friends, we’d just seen Janet Jackson’s right breast, and all the men in our lives started talking like the guys from Queer Eye without realising it was kind of nearly maybe pretty homophobic.

I was 13 years old and saw the film with my dad — a man who had raised me on a healthy diet of jumbo-sized Coke and Ace Ventura movies — and it became a touchstone for us in the years that followed. We saw it twice more at the cinema, bought the DVD immediately upon its release, and grew accustomed to speaking in a rich dialect of movie quotes that my stepmother resents to this day.

This got old, sure. There are only so many times you can say “I love lamp” before it loses its already tenuous charm. But that’s the tradeoff you make with these cult comedies. You love them with the intensity of an old family pet: you share stories about them, maybe exchange some funny moments with fellow dog lovers — but one day you have to put them down. It’s for their own sake.

When they announced the Anchorman sequel, I was excited. It was like I had a new puppy coming home. The same breed as my old one, but fresher and full of life. What I got instead was the pleasure of sitting in helpless terror as Paramount Pictures dug up my old dog and waved his carcass in front of my face, for months on end.

I’m totally aware that the common expression is ‘dead horse’, but I feel this situation is more dire than that. This zombie dog of a marketing ploy needs to end.

The Damage So Far:

Ron Burgundy is no longer a legendary character, but a successful brand. It’s a great move by the marketing company, and the public is eating it up. His profession as a news anchor works perfectly with most media tie-ins, and his retro charm and naivety lets them sell previously pompous things like Chrysler in an almost-satirical, self-referential, and ultimately successful way: the 70 ads they shot resulted in a 36% sales increase of the Dodge Durango. The film hasn’t even been properly released yet, but they’re already making money. Lots of it.

It was cute at first. The idea of Burgundy reporting on international news events was novel enough, and it was nice to see him have a small go at Tony Abbott. But that was then followed by a message about the Grand Final and another about the Melbourne Cup; he appeared on The Project, ESPN with Champ Kind, the MTV Europe Music Awards, and then he dropped into a North Dakota newsroom for a live broadcast.

The campaign even made its way to Sweden, where he made ads about a court decision legalising masturbation. You might have shared one of these clips on your Facebook. It’s funny for the most part, and it seemed distant enough from the first film that it felt new. Paramount have really capitalised on this too; each time you share something (including this article), you feed one of the most successful and extensive social media strategies ever made for a film. On top of regular viral engagement over Facebook, Anchorman 2 asks you to “Join Ron’s Crew” by making your own newsreel on Tumblr, and Twitter encourages you to #askron questions.

But wait, there’s more. Ron Burgundy now has his own flavour of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, his own style of Jockey underwear, and his own scotch; the Washington news museum now has a dedicated space for him and his news desk, and buses, billboards and phone booths are plastered worldwide with his signature moustache. You’ve probably seen pictures of people posing with them. Here’s one now. What a fun guy.

Why Is This A Problem?

This stuff is the glitter of the film world at the moment. You want to like it and it seems fun enough at first, but then some idiot splashes it all over you and you’re left trying to scrub it off your skin for weeks on end. WHAT IS THIS FRESH HELL AND HOW DO WE MAKE IT STOP?

It’s been made even more cringeworthy by some very cheap nods to the first film. The new ice cream is butterscotch flavoured, or ‘Scotchy Scotch Scotch’, and the forthcoming liquor is called Great Odin’s Raven. (I’m genuinely surprised they haven’t launched their own line of lamps. No guesses at the brand name.) They’ve been reeling out the old cast to sing ‘Afternoon Delight’ on cue, too: we saw it first at the Sydney premiere as it flooded the Instagram feeds of all our D-grade celebrities, and now it’s most recently been pulled on none other than Saturday Night Live with the help (?) of One Direction — a band who were in primary school when that iconic scene was first screened.

No one needed this. It’s like seeing your dad and uncle rekindling the college do-wop band after too many shandies at Christmas lunch, and inviting your flamboyant cousins to join in. Yes, yes, you’re all very talented, please finish forever now, thanks.

The biggest problem, of course, is that this sequel feels dead before it even had a chance. Yes, it will make a tonne of money. People will go see it. I’ll definitely be one of them. But after all of this lead-up, the magic that existed with the first film will be well and truly gone. Once the full release is out, there will be even more of an ad push. The meme generator on the Anchorman website — yep, that exists — will go into overdrive, and the use-by dates for funny quotes will drop from years to months to weeks.

Just like Burgundy himself, I have learnt that the times they are a’changing. People seem to love it, and I’m sure this campaign has changed the face of movie marketing forever. But if I see one more moustache on the street I think I might end up killing a guy.

On the other hand, we’ve all been waiting since Clueless to see Paul Rudd pull some squat action like this. So maybe it’s not all bad.

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Meg Watson is the current Arts & Culture editor of Concrete Playground, and 2013 editor of Farrago. She specialises in writing excitable stuff about art, loud opinion, okay fiction, and bad tweets.