I don’t watch broadcast/cable TV. Don’t have the time. Hate commercials. Not a sports guy. When I do hear about a series that is worth watching, it ends up on DVD and I catch it that way.

So I get phone calls like this.

My Dad: “Are you by any chance watching the Sugar Bowl?”

Me: “No.”

My Dad: “Well they just ran a commercial for your movie!” (For some reason it’s “my” movie.) It really looked good!”

Me: “Cool.”

(I want the movie to be as successful as possible, after all.)

It still wasn’t going to make me watch football, I mean, outside of a dramatic setting where a blimp full of explosives is going to crash into the stadium.

So, I thought I’d have to wait for the DVD Special Futures to see the TV spots being run for “my” movie Yumper, but in this age of the InterTubes and all, turns out I don’t.

MovieWeb has the commercials over on their site.

Here’s a link to three 30-second spots (please excuse the ten second commercial in front of each.)

But here’s an odder little example of cross-marketing: A combination Hewlett Packard/Jumper commercial.

I’m probably missing out of a huge swath of shared culture by missing all those TV commercials. As my beloved said, on returning to the states after two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya in the early eighties, American advertising is actually smart, funny, and arresting. It has to be. It has all the selective pressures of an evolutionary maelstrom. Survive (sell) or die.

But I don’t have to watch it.

When Twilight Ninja Girl was but a ninjalet, she would insist on watching all the “special futures” on the DVD’s. I thought, hey! what a great idea for an SF writer. But, no, she was talking about the supplementary material usually included in todays multimedia DVD movies. The deleted scenes, the bloopers, and the “making of” documentaries. Look at this picture:

The guy in the maroon sweater is Craig Byrd, a producer with Mob Scene Productions. He makes programs. He makes the sort of programs that make up the “Special Futures.” Like, the The Making of ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World or The Night Club of Your Dreams: The Making of ‘Moulin Rouge!’ or (and this really impressed me) Celebrating the Man in Black: The Making of ‘Walk the Line’.

And now he’s making a documentary on the making of Jumper. This picture, by the way, is my living room. He flew in from LA, met a local crew, and interviewed me last Tuesday.

We talked for about an hour–maybe we’ll get about five or ten minutes of it in the finished program?

By the way, he’s been on most of the locations during the filming and he says Jamie Bell is incredible in the film and what’s more, keeps his energy up by drinking twelve Dr. Pepper’s a day.