This week­end is the British Sil­ver­stone grand prix. As part of The Dark Knight’s pro­mo­tion, the Toy­ota Forumla One car has been dec­o­rated with Dark Knight logos, sym­bols, etc — the usual. How­ever, as part of the press jun­ket, This For­mula One car took to Sil­ver­stone to “race”, although not really a race, with the tum­bler — strut­ting its stuff on the cor­ners. The video below also fea­tures a pit stop for the bat­mo­bile and some closer detail on its inner work­ings. The Bat pod also makes an appearance

Via Carscoop, thanks Skam

A new mes­sage was posted to the mains and pub­lic forums of Cit­i­zens for Bat­man today,

Poster: BriDog72 — Thurs­day, July 3rd, 2008 at 00:12
Seems there’s been a bit of a slipup with the project me and Batfan73 have been work­ing on. BatFan’s in jail and I need everyone’s help. He left me a voice­mail, it was kinda gar­bled, but he said he was picked up by the cops for tres­pass­ing, so he needs some help get­ting every­thing acti­vated. He’s not sure when he’s going to be able to extract him­self from his sit­u­a­tion.
He said he needs some­one to get some sort of key off of an invoice, num­ber 38272899 (geez, I hope I copied that down right), but he got cut off before he could tell me what this invoice is or even where to find it. We need this key to acti­vate every­thing.
Can any­one fig­ure this out? We’re going to need to fix this or the whole thing’s ruined! Anyone?

In an email to Glenn Barhyte, Jim Gor­don made ref­er­ence to Maroni Imports, lead­ing us to a new viral site, www​.maroni​im​ports​.com

With the invoice num­ber from the forums post and the sruname “Cras­ton”, which appeared in a small news update to the Gotham City Rail website:

ALERT: The STCS will undergo ini­tial fine-tuning of its soft­ware on the evening of July 8th. This rou­tine main­te­nance may result in tem­po­rary inter­mit­tent sys­tem delays. We apol­o­gize for any incon­ve­nience this may cause. — C. Cras­ton, Sr. Elec. Engi­neer, GCR

With this infor­ma­tion the afore­men­tioned invoice can be down­loaded, at the bot­tom of it there is a key for a sig­nal booster, Key: 5D45C08AA6C3638D7829C0D5183FDB14B0CDBF1DCB12. With this key, the sig­nal booster was acti­vated and CFB was updated to show two sets of co-ordinates in New York and Chicago. Hence the two loca­tions for the big event this July 8th are now known:

New York and Chicago

CFB has since been updated to include a new mis­sion statement:

Some­times, you have to take a stand. You have to fight for respect. You have to let the entire world know you’re here.
On July 8th, nobody will be able to ignore us. Gather at the above coor­di­nates at the appointed time, and help us take a stand in sup­port of Bat­man!
If you can’t join us on the ground, we’ll be pro­vid­ing a way for you to watch what goes down, live on this web­site.
Defend Gotham! Defend Bat­man!
Key: 5D45C08AA6C3638D7829C0D5183FDB14B0CDBF1DCB12
Sig­nal Booster sta­tus: ON

Thanks Pierre!

Read the rest of this entry »

The clues from the lat­est Why So Seri­ous viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign have led us to the stu­pid bats page con­tain­ing a brand new Dark Knight poster made up of Joker cards and scratched Joker ramblings:

The prize for the Oper­a­tor puz­zle was a new arcade game, “Punk Drop”:

whysose​ri​ous​.com/​p​u​n​k​d​r​op/

The aim is to knock down the “punks”. If you hit a dummy, a light appears next to another one, if you hit that one the light moves to the next dummy, and so on. If you com­plete three lit dummy hits in a row a ticket comes out of the machine, link­ing to a new “Stu­pid Bats” page:

whysose​ri​ous​.com/​s​t​u​p​i​d​b​a​ts/

A new Viral chal­lenge has been unveiled at whysose​ri​ous​.com/​o​p​e​r​a​t​or/ through a new text from the Joker:

Wake up, clown! You have *one hour* to reply to be a part of today’s fun. /operator

Fol­low­ing a reply, this was sent:

Good. Do not reply again. I’ll be in touch…

After the hour dead­line, par­tic­i­pants were sent code words:

Work together, clowns. Your code-word: XXXXXXXX. Your part­ner: XXX-XXX-XXXX. Do NOT call until told to. Do not pub­li­cize this number.

Wait for a call — you will receive one or more code words. Relay these words to your partner.

You’re the first in the chain. Call your part­ner and relay your code-word NOW.

When all “relays” were com­pleted, all five chains had dropped and five words are shown, these all have the word “house” in com­mon, enter­ing that into the box reveals a new game, “Punk Drop”.

Thanks Pierre!

Why So Seri­ous have updated their front page for the first time in what seems an age — it now cov­ers the entire Viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign com­plete with Joker check­list on tasks, a list of Gotham city web pages and assorted items that can all be clicked for part of the viral adven­ture. For exam­ple, bowl­ing shoes, a per­son­al­ity quiz, the trailer clip­pings, let­ters from a ran­som note, etc.

Three future tasks have yet to be ticked off:

12. Be good to my guests
13. Gather all my fans
14. Leave a big mark

Reports

Some of the viral links on WSS con­tain reports on the viral event, with date, a list of occur­rences, the end result, pic­tures and the after­math — pro­vid­ing a suc­cinct review of how we’ve got this far:

Cit­i­zens for Batman

Where a page orig­i­nally stood we now find a count­down, head­ing omi­nously towards July 8th. CFB have also been send­ing out their pro­pa­ganda to lucky Gotham citizens,

Includ­ing the letter:

Cit­i­zens for Batman!

It’s time to go pub­lic. To really defend Bat­man, we have to show the world how big our move­ment is. So check out the good­ies inside and show your pride in CFB!

And get ready for a MAJOR show of force July 8th. (check out cit​i​zens​for​bat​man​.org for the latest.

Defend Gotham. Defend Batman!

Brian Dou­glass
Founder, Cit­i­zens for Bat­man

Thanks Dioz, Csam and Pierre!

Domi­nos have unveiled their lat­est part in the ongo­ing Dark Knight pro­mo­tional cam­paign — a vault filled with good­ies, includ­ing an extended trailer with new footage. There are wall­pa­pers and many fea­tures still listed as com­ing soon, such as a mobile game, a new trailer and inter­views, pre­sum­ably with cast and crew.

Domi­nos Dark Knight Vault

Thanks Pierre, Tim, Anton, Linda, Csam!

The “Crime” episode

This explains that weird ‘clip­pet’ we saw of The Joker down by the docks.

Episode with Jim Gordon