A few months ago, Watchmen director Zach Snyder started a contest where fans who were handy with a camera could construct ads for products put out by company owned by the character, Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt. Winners would get the chance to have their ads play on television sets in the background of the film.
Well, it appears that the contest is over and the winners have appeared online. You can see all the clips on the Watchmen YouTube Channel. The best commercials capture the mid-80s cheese (Watchmen is set in 1985) of that era’s ads quite well.
Cinema Blend has posted five of their favorites on its site. Here are three of mine.
This one is for the Veidt toyline that fans of the comic will remember well.
Love the director credit at the beginning. This next one is an ad that might have made the 1985 High School version of me buy the hairspray in an attempt to be cool.
The creator of this fake ad has two other versions of this idea in the winning ads.
And, finally, this ad for Nostalgia perfume captures the Bergmanesque quality of the 80s Calvin Klein Obsession ads (which many contest entries tried to do to varying degrees of success), but also ties in to the comic’s (and, hopefully, the film’s) plot as well.
The five winners voted best by the fans received a High-Definition Canon Vixia HG10 camcorder and eight other winners picked by Snyder himself received $1,000. All presumably have a shot of making it to the big screen.
