What does it mean?
We refer, of course, to the Yukon’s new tourism slogan, Larger Than Life.
It’s a bit, um, murky, don’t you think?
And it cost $200,000. (That’s $66,666 a word.)
It’s also cribbed from the Backstreet Boys — you know, that prissy, well-coifed boy band.
It released Larger Than Life in ’99.
The song featured this similarly meaningless chorus: “All you people can’t you see, can’t you see/ How your love’s affecting our reality/ Every time we’re down/ You can make it right/ And that makes you larger than life.”
Are your hips shaking?
Larger Than Life was also a 1996 movie starring Bill Murray, who played opposite a circus elephant that he inherited from his long-lost father.
It’s a stupid, ambiguous title. Still is.
Not surprisingly, the movie didn’t do very well.
We prefer Snakes on a Plane.
Now that’s catchy.
It’s the moniker for a movie coming out in a month, or so, starring Samuel L. Jackson.
There’s no disputing what the movie is about — snakes on a plane.
“It’s perfect,” screenwriter Josh Friedman, who was almost hired to rewrite the script, recently told Maclean’s.
“It’s a title. It’s a concept. It’s a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.”
It may sound goofy, but the film has received multimillions of free media hype — including, now, in these pages — and is an internet cult phenomenon, with websites, blog postings, fan art and mock video trailers.
It is almost guaranteed to be a blockbuster.
But, after focus groups, the studio planned to do something “less cheesy.”
It picked (yawn!) Pacific Air Flight 121.
Jackson nearly pulled out of the project.
“We’re totally changing that back,” he said when told of the change. “That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.”
“Why should the studio try to dress up a perfectly good snakes-on-a-plane flick with a stupid title, like Pacific Air Flight 121?” wrote one blogger.
Why indeed.
Now, in the Yukon, we have Larger Than Life, a slogan that sounds like the product of 15 Bureaucrats Locked In A Room.
Was Canada’s True North so bad? The Magic and the Mystery?
At least those things had panache, or echoed our national anthem.
Larger than Life evokes the Backstreet Boys, a lacklustre elephant movie and a plus-size clothing line.
It’s supposed to dispel the “myth” the territory has bad, unpredictable weather, said marketing director Pierre Germain.
Myth?
Hell and blood, man, the territory does have wild, unpredictable weather.
A better slogan might have been “Yukon: The Cold Stays Cold, The Hot Stays Hot.”
And that cost $1 — the price of this newspaper.
Or how about The Last Frontier?
Land of the Midnight Sun.
Land Of Light.
Our Home and Native Land.
Where Alaskans Vacation.
No Snakes Here!
Mind The Bears!
But we get Larger Than Life.
And that’s not even worth $1 on iTunes. (RM)
Editor’s postscript: Send us your suggestions. We’d love to hear ‘em.