MOG

Okay.

Couple of years ago, BMW did The Hire, a series of short films by name directors like Guy Ritchie and others, to promote their cars. They were distribute free on the internet, but have since been withdrawn (officially - if you have a BitTorrent client installed, which of course you do not use to illegally download music, here is a link to a torrent which includes all of the films). In my opinion, the best of the lot is the Crossroads/The Devil & Daniel Webster cross, Beat the Devil (or is it Race the Devil?) featuring James Brown and Gary Oldman as the Devil in Las Vegas, with a surprise guest cameo. Second best would be Ritchey's Star, featuring an unidentified and totally fictitious bitchy blonde singer...

Great stuff; well worth your time.

But that's not the story i came here to tell you today.

And neither is the very well-done online animated whodunnit/puzzle game Gotham Girls, featuring all of the distaff members of the cast of the original animated Batman series. But you should look at it and see if yopu can solve the mystery.

No, what this post is about (finally) is another BMW online promo video series - Hammer and Coop


This is produced by people who have seen about three hundred and fifty seven too many epsiodes of both Six Million Dollar Man and Knight Rider (which, BTW, should never be confused with George Romero's only non-horror film, the brilliant Arthurian fantasy [heh], Knightriders, [which, incidentally, features a cameo appearance by Steven King and his lovely wife Tabby]).

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THUG (on cellphone): Boss - it's Reggie BOSS: I hope you have good news for me. THUG: They got away. BOSS: That would be ... bad news.

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That's "Coop" as in "Coop 07" - an AI-equipped turbocharged self-aware Very British BMW "Mini Cooper".
(For an explanation as to why i put scare quotes on the car name, see the footnote to my review of the original version of The Italian Job.)
As of the latest episode - episode 4, posted 3/8/07 - we don't know who or what Hammer (the human [i think] half of the team) is, but there are suggestions he was the subject/victim of some sort of secret research program leaving him at least somewhat super-human.
Some nice driving sequences - in Episode 1 there's a nice overhead shot of a very neat turn, going from reversing very fast up a narrow alley to going forwards in the same direction; a fast 180 in an alley not much more than two or so feet wider than the car is long.

The story goes that legendary NASCAR driver Curtis Turner used to show off by setting up two rows of coke bottles as far apart as the bumpers of his Cadillac, and then putting the big barge through a full 180 bootleg turn between the rows without knocking any over...)

So, aside from the trailer, the four episodes so far released (Episode 5 scheduled for 15 March 07) and "extras" like the desktop wallpaper shot reproduced above, there's {ooo - look! finally something actually about music!} a music video on the site.
Hammer and Coop "sing" Asia's Heat of the Moment.

Posted on 03/10/2007