Not only has the city of Boston made itself into a laughing stock through the overzealous response to the promotional campaign for what will probably be a Grade Z movie, by doing so it has turned it’s collective back on it’s own heritage.
Boston is a city that knows something about terrorist tactics. In December 16, 1773 patriot sympathizers dumped a boatload of tea leaves into Boston harbor as a protest of the ridiculously high tax on the favorite British beverage. The tea party came roughly three years after a group of patriot sympathizers were fired upon by the British.
Boston – affectionately known as bean town – was home to some of the key figures in the American War for Independence. Patriot Samuel Adams called the city his home, as did Paul Revere, whose midnight ride to warn patriots of a British invasion has been recounted in verse.
It is against this backdrop that Boston officials decided to prosecute two men who were installing electronic promotional devices for an Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. The charges against Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were for placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. City officials have been making noise about prosecuting the duo’s ultimate employers, Cartoon Network, and other businesses that are part of the Time-Warner conglomerate.
For those not in the know, ATHF is a staple of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim segments which air at midnight during the workweek. ATHF features characters that are crudely drawn and humor that is on a par with the artwork. That being said, there were more reasonable responses to the guerilla ad campaign. Officials in New York City and Seattle Washington where the lite-brite-like devices were initially found on Tuesday simply asked the Cartoon Network for the locations and informed executives there that permits were required. It took the city of Boston to go into a panic mode 24 hours later.
Boston’s actions did nothing to honor those patriots who gave their lives for the establishment of freedoms that are guaranteed to all. Instead, the $750,000 fiasco recalls a relatively brief time in the city’s history when it was a hotbed of censorship. The phrase, "Banned in Boston" on a book or a movie would virtually guarantee that the offending piece of work would be a bestseller or top box-office draw everywhere else in the country.
The first shot fired at the Battle of Breed’s Hill (often erroneously called Bunker Hill) was the origin of the "shot heard round the world." Boston can now be called the home of the ad campaign stalled around the world.
Not the city’s most shining moment.