"Hacker's Holiday" (from McAfee) Trivia

Some trivia about the video and the making of it:

Can you guess what they used to stain that new white shirt?

Tim actually went down and bought three junk computers from a shop (which Shane had contacted and arranged for). Two of them ended up at my parent's house being used for parts. The third--you saw what happened to it.

The computer pile in the end of the video includes multiple keyboards. Can you see how many they destroyed?

Tim went out for several days before the shoot collecting items from local thrift stores to help. He came home one day and said, "Yeah, I found a bunch of golf clubs at DI and bought them." I had no idea why my non-golfer husband wanted clubs until he got done with the day of filming. I thought he was picking up a new mid-winter hobby!

Originally, at the end of the video, Tim appeared and identified himself and told people to buy McAfee products. The message was great, but the way he said it, and the way it was filmed, made me always want to conclude it with "And remember, this holiday season, don't drink and drive. And check the donor box on your license. It only takes pennies a day to feed an orphan. Register to vote; it's your future at stake. These pets need you; give to a shelter in your area. Once a species is gone, it never comes back."  So I was glad they cut that part.

My favorite part of the video got left on the editing room floor: there used to be a very short scene of Tim explaining something to his "wife" and the door being slammed in his face. I loved that part! (No, that doesn't say anything about our marriage--I just thought it was the best acting in the film).

The "don't let yourself be driven to destruction" at the end I think came from Shane--and I think it's brilliant.

At the beginning, Tim is wearing mis-matched socks. When he got home, he tried to throw them away but Nathanael kept taking the black one out of the trash, and now it's sitting in a box in the living room here in Colorado. Nathanael still won't let us throw it away.

Nathanael (age 11 months) is in LOVE with the video. He watches it, dancing, dozens of times a day. He claps when Tim claps, and bobs his head when Tim does, and flaps his mouth when Tim sings the "aaahhhs". It's really funny. Except when he cries and screams because it's time to turn it off. One time he watched it with Tim standing in the room, and he kept looking back and forth between the screen and his daddy, like he was trying to figure the whole thing out.

For Thanksgiving, my family had "big family" pictures taken. Tim had to be in the pictures unshaven because he was filming in three days and had to look like he hadn't shaved in 12 days.

I LOVE what the top of the blue screen says on it.

Throughout production, Tim and Shane kept having discussions about "using protection," and I couldn't help thinking about the other times people use that phrase.

Daniel, age 4, came to me after watching the video several times and said, "There isn't really two Daddies, right?" "No," I said, confused. "And there's not really 4 Daddies, right?" he said. "No," I said, "there's just ONE Daddy." "So how come there's two Daddies there now? How'd they do that?" Dan asked, pointing to the computer screen Nathanael was re-watching the video on. Ah! I understood. And I explained split-screen film making to him. He was visibly relieved.

The hat worn by the "hacker Tim" was brought back from Russia by my sister. Tim owns one like it, but it's in storage in Las Vegas, so we had to borrow an identical one from my brother.

My kids won't let me throw away the torn paper from the box Tim unwraps in the video, so it's still sitting in the back of our minivan.

There was one specific line that had to be changed in the final days of post-production. It was a week too late to re-film...so there is a second of film where Tim's mouth doesn't match the soundtrack for one single word. Can you find the spot?

Many people have emailed or posted comments to the video saying they wanted the computer to go up in flames at the end. I guess it was the "gasoline" they poured on in the middle--I wanted it to burst into flames, too. But you know, they destroyed a real computer (not a movie computer). With real sports implements. So now you know--that's what would really happen if you took a golf club/baseball bat/tennis racket/cheese grater to your desktop.

Tim came home with that red "woobie" vest and wore it the next day and I had to laugh. Two of our toddlers have vests JUST like it.

When Anda first saw the video, she said, "You know, I think that scary mask must be what a computer virus looks like." You know.... the klingon?

Most of the costumes in the movie are now in a box in the basement, sitting right next to the moosebutter costumes, the Toxic Audio costumes, and the Mister Tim costumes. Tim and I are talking about building a costume closet into his office to hold all the clothing he has collected.

If Tim would go for it, I'd be willing to take bids on those pajama pants. And that robe. If we still have them.

Not sure about this one, but that hat looks an awful lot like the "reject" hat that's been floating around moosebutter Christmas shows for years. Somehow, we ended up with three matching hats and one that didn't match--it's white parts were far far "fuzzier" than the other hats. We ended up buying the fourth matching hat, but the mismatched one just never quite went away, even several sets of matched hats later. (Of course, now that I think about it, I suspect there were two or more hats involved in the filming of Hacker's Holiday, since one had ketchup on it....)

In several of the scenes, it looks like Tim's white shirt is inside out; in other scenes, it clearly is not.

In one spot, it looks like the computer shatters the baseball bat instead of the other way 'round.

The CPU that gets smashed originally came from a company that was really big in Utah for a long time. Their main selling point for a couple of years was their lifetime guarantee on the computers--which makes it ironic that THIS was the brand of junk computers the shop sold Tim and Shane to smash. I personally know people who bought the same computer and wanted to smash it a few years later when the company stopped honoring the lifetime guarantee.  Can you see the little label? Know where this computer originally came from?

The filming happened at a studio in SLC that backs onto the first place immigrants come to when they reach Utah. So the whole morning, while Tim was smashing a computer with a bunch of lights and cameras surrounding him, immigrants were arriving and walking past on the other side of the fence, watching. I wonder what they thought? Quite a strange first sight in America!

This time it wasn't real gasoline they poured on the computer. I'm hoping, if the video is received well enough, there will be a next one....and that it might involve either real gasoline (and that oft-wished-for explosion) or liquid nitrogen and a John-Henry style hammer.

If you have to go see it again now that you know all this stuff, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtMz2fG5FDU