Hitting the big time
Riding on the success of the videos, Fensler, Hooker, and Lussenhop decided to seek their fortunes in LA. Fensler found himself pigeonholed.
“People saw me as this person who remixed cartoons, and I’d get a lot of requests to do that,” says Fensler. “But that’s not the only thing I wanted to do.”
In that vein, he made some animated promo spots for Sealab 2021 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and a full episode that never aired. He tried and failed to make a live-action soap opera with mannequins called Sunset Feelings.
But their luck turned around in 2004, when Lussenhop answered a Craigslist ad for an internship on the Adult Swim show Tom Goes to the Mayor, and struck up a friendship with its creators, the comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Lussenhop became their writing / editing collaborator, and hooked Fensler up with a writing gig on their next venture, The Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Fensler stayed with the show for five seasons, and collaborated with Tim and Eric on subsequent projects, such as the risqué Flying Lotus music video, “Dance Floor Dale,” which also went viral.
For the last two and a half years, Fensler has been working in the creative department of the Portland, OR advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, best known for the Nike “Just Do It” tagline and the Old Spice campaign.
“He keeps a very low profile,” says Robin Rosenberg, Wieden + Kennedy’s creative resource manager. “It’s not like I’ve taken a poll, but I would guess that most people here, even though they’re familiar with the GI Joe PSAs, don’t know Eric made them.”
Feelin’ viral
The GI Joe PSAs occupy a uniquely liminal space between traditional word-of-mouth sharing and the dawn of mass online sharing, as they were initially screened and distributed at the art gallery, but then also were shared online. “The screenings were really the origin of how it happened,” says Hooker. “Human beings showing up to an actual place in an actual room.”
But it’s a pretty good bet they would have gone viral without the person-to-person jumpstart.
“People respond to seeing familiar images with a weird voice or something non sequitur thrown in, and GI Joe had that formula,” says Lussenhop. Recently, Lussenhop and Eric Wareheim released a video with an original rap about hippie pubic hair called “Backpacker Bush,” that has yet to crack 100,000 views – not exactly “Gangnam Style.”
“We came up with the idea for this on a trip to New Zealand, and of all our videos, we would have put all our chips on this one going viral,” says Lussenhop, who also writes and stars in his own video series, Pound House. “I think if we’d had 50 Cent rapping, maybe it would have, but we didn’t have that familiarity quotient.”
Fensler insists that he “didn’t really crack the code” on what makes a video viral, but his protestations provide a decent directive. “I didn’t really set out to do all those things. I make stuff I enjoy, and I have a sense of what surprises me,” he says. “Why not just make something that you like?”
Design by Scott Kellum
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