Sometime back in 2004, Mojo and The SCUMM Bar banded together to create an April Fool’s Day joke for the ages: a fake Monkey Island movie trailer. Yet, close as the prank came to fruition, the plans to execute it was aborted on March 3rd, 2004. Why? Remi takes a quick look back at this footnote in Mojo’s history.
Exactly how the idea of this trailer came about is somewhat unclear, but it was at least partly related to elTee having watched Cast Away and noticed some similarities between its island and Monkey Island. The domino bricks started falling accordingly and the plan was simple: A) Infiltrate “Solomon,” a nineteen-year-old kid whose father worked at 20th Century Fox, into LucasForums; B) create a (fake) proof-of-concept teaser for a Monkey Island movie; C) leak said trailer onto the pit of LucasForums – “The Harbour.” (Snarkily renamed “Delete Me” at the time.) Of course, as these things go, we started over-complicating things.
One issue was that neither elTee nor I knew how to use video editing software. I decided to take the bullet and learn Premiere, and put together something that more or less could be mistaken for the real thing – at least if you squinted really hard.
Meanwhile, elTee started posting as the wide-eyed “Solomon,” a fan of Curse of Monkey Island, a title he just had learned was preceded by two games. And as an aside: His father often brought home DVDs with teasers, trailers, and proofs-of-concept of upcoming movies.
On IRC, elTee and I started enlisting more people in the prank – victims will remain unnamed – and the trailer started coming together. A real proof-of-concept of the fake proof-of-concept was ready for vetting on March 1st: