November 17, 2005

Russian Reality Ruse A new reality TV show is aiming to pull off the biggest hoax in TV history - by persuading a group of Britons that they have been blasted into space.
posted by techsmith 18 years ago
  • Space Cowboys, huh? Maybe the hula girl on the dash would be a giveaway. Mind you, Brits are a gullible sort. After all, how many were duped into settling in Canada? Heh heh. Oh, wait...
  • What about that whole "lack of gravity" thing?
  • Seems like a lot of work and high probability of failure to me... How 'bout a reality show to convince people that reality television at all resembles reality?
  • Lets see who can tell the difference between pulling a real 2G burn for a few minutes or just being tossed around. This is the dumbest idea ever. No matter how it turns out, respect for human intelligence drops. Oh yeah, the gravity is going to be "artificial" and they'll be using "acceleration compensators" on launch. Maybe there will be an emergency involving daleks and the dilithium crystal matrix.
  • What Mord said. They'd have to get some seriously ignorant people (but then why wouldn't they?) to fall for something like this.
  • Maybe the show is a hoax of a hoax, and they wanted to see how many people would believe their press announcement.
  • That post is obviously a hoax, un- Trying to see how many of us gullible people will believe there really is a thread about a hoax press announcement regarding a "reality show" which, in reality is a hoax, of being blasted into space (which, as everybody knows - is a hoax)! Nice try, but no banana! You do win the lovely set of steak knives though - well done!
  • You know that show Big Brother? I was actually looking forward to it until I saw it, and then I was really disappointed. I mean you have like 12 people locked in a house without access to media or anything of the outside. You could do so much crazy stuff with that. Convince them the US was taken over by China. Or Bush nuked North Korea. Or that there was poison gas filling up the house. All they did was let them interact and have sex with each other (which was of course edited out). I mean, how lame is that?
  • And now for the details. (via BoingBoing>
  • No details on how they plan to explain gravity?
  • Oh, I'm sure they will explain it the same way they explain everything on Star Trek -- you just reverse the polarity.
  • Or modify the harmonics.
  • Flush the warp plasma phase stabilizer.
  • Hehe. 18 years ago by fimbulvetr
  • Oops. Treknobabble.
  • via fimbulvetr's link: "The unwitting participants, who were selected for their suggestibility..." Translation: morons.
  • I like how they clarify they are not stupid, just really creative and with big imaginations. *cough* morons *cough*
  • Ah, come on, they already did this on 1969, didn't they..?
  • Zing!
  • Anybody want to chip in for the rental of one (1) helicopter? Maybe a good ol' air raid siren will do. As they say, it takes a carpenter to build a barn, but any old jackass with a sledgehammer can knock it down. As God as my witness, I AM THAT JACKASS!
  • I think it's a given, after the past couple years of such shows as "Whoops, My Bride is a Man" and "We Make You Eat Bugs Island" that anybody signing up for any kind of reality show and thinking they're going to get what they're told they're going to get is a moron.
  • As God as my witness, I AM THAT JACKASS! ...filed away for future use.
  • Metahoax!
  • Maybe they just want to get rid of British people and are flinging all contestant hopefuls into outer space 24 hours a day until somebody notices and says; "HEY! What is this? Has some weird plague hit London while I was in a coma in the hospital or something, because I'm looking dolefully around at banks of hanging pay phones thingies and I don't see any British people!
  • A show where they take a bound Fox news anchor or republican congressman in a white, unmarked jet, to a prison in some far-away country, THAT I'd love to see. Just imagine the audience's laughter, the guy's uncontrollable bladder, when he's told to strip! Priceless! I HATE reality TV. Actors? Who needs them, now that we have so many people dying to be humilliated in public? We, as an audience, are being led into asking for harder doses: real tears, real suffering, from real people. Now THAT'S entertainment! Sheeez.
  • Fake or not, it would still be fun to participate in... at least 'til I got the psychosomatic space fever, opened the hatch, and we all got sucked out into a parking lot in downtown Vladivostok.
  • Whatever you do, Space Cadet Stimpy, DON'T PRESS THE RED BUTTON!
  • No details on how they plan to explain gravity? Yes. Contestants will be told that, in order to prevent the effect of weightlessness, they will all be given heavy boots. Actually, here's what the Independent has to say about that:
    The training they receive will consist of lectures delivered by actors accompanied by a genuine space expert, in which 80 per cent of the information will be true and 20 per cent fiction. Issues that will be explained to them include the fact they will not be weightless in near space
  • Then they are casting based on lack of physics knowledge. Orbit --> Weightlessness, near-space or not.
  • I'd bet $10 if you asked a random sampling of people on the street about gravity and weightlessness, you'd find about 50% had no clue.