If Monty Python were physics majors…they might come up with this. Forget the Dancing Waters; we present The Dancing Sodas!
Update: we DID present them. Now they’ve cruised through YouTube and insisted that everyone take the video down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted (and if I weren’t annoyed with them I’d put a link to their site. But I am)
Double UPDATE: Okay, their friend has posted their side of the story, and I’m not so pissed off as I used to be. The video is available here, and the mad scientists (one of them’s even madder than I thought; he’s a LAWYER!) get a bit of revenue every time someone watches it there. My computer here won’t play that vid, but if yours will, it’s worth watching, to say the least. I note that revver will allow you to embed the video in your Myspace or whatever, but since that doesn’t work with WordPress we won’t be doing it here.
Via Sploid:
Two men in Maine have proven that the recipe for miraculous fun has only two ingredients: Diet Coke and Mentos.
In a three-minute video (Watch it in Quicktime here or on Youtube here), Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz show how this simple food combination can create astonishing geysers of carbonated, sugary goodness. They set off 100 Diet Coke bottles in an elaborately choreographed display worthy of the Bellagio fountains. They also venture into some detail about the physics and chemistry behind it, dispelling the popular notion that gum arabic may be the key to the mystery…
If you enjoy this kind of insanity, check out the rest of the blog here. You can also click on the Science or Weird categories in the sidebar over there. Squid too, Squid is good.
26 Comments
just a few days ago I saw another mentos/diet coke clip.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8694244338798619086&q=pepsi+girl+super+burp
not as sophisticated but still very interesting.
“Don’t try this at home!” (’cause your mother won’t clean up after you…)
While giggling, all I could think of was “Oh, they’re really going to need showers after this.”
I loved the toast at the end. Thanks for the superburp link. Sheer class!
Ahhh.. very good.. works like a charm, Little L.
Thankies. It was good for several hundred hits yesterday.
Despite the warnings of “Don’t do this at home” I bet this won’t stop my college friends :) Instant fun when needed :D
There’s apparently a homeless guy who is doing this (on a smaller scale) at the Main & Terminal Skytrain station here in Vancouver. I hope he credits me for the inspiration!
If your friends succeed in doing anything newsworthy, put the video on YouTube and I’ll be happy to host it.
This was GREAT!!! I loved it!! Such creativity. I’m going to send this to everyone I know!
Here a message from Holland.
We did this 10 years ago! A twelve year old boy did on a TV show.
raincoaster, I can give you an approximate translation of the Spanish if you want.
That would be great! I only speak five words of Spanish, which the Count taught me back when I watched Sesame Street. Uno, dos, tres, quattro, cinco. Period, full stop.
It’s great for a hit whore like me to get a pingback. Some radiostation posted this link on their home page, too! Bizarre to be making the airwaves in New Jersey.
And Rick, how cool! Glad to hear it; if there’s video I will be happy to post it here. Anybody remember the boy’s name? Actually, these two look young. Maybe one of them is that boy, grown up. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz are their names.
I thought the diet Coke and mentos experiment was awsume and me and my freinds found another was http://www.funnyjunk.com/movies/158/Coke+and+Mentos/stream
Folks, please respect copyright. Eepybird.com has asked not to have this video displayed on YouTube or any other such site as they consider it to be a copyright violation.
http://wordpress.com/tos/
Copyright violation is grounds for removing your blog.
In case you were not aware of the violation, remove this link please.
Failure to do so WILL cause permanent removal of the blog. I’d not like to do that but copyright is serious stuff even if all this mentos / coke stuff is really cool.
Please advise me through the feedback link inside your blog.
Hi – it’s been discussed. Ignore my comment above and feel free to delete it and this one :)
Hi podz and drmike, thanks for looking into this for me. The video is kaput anyway; they have a nasty habit of doing that, and you never know till you try to play it. I'll leave the thing up anyway, as a hint of what all the fuss was about.
Eepybird should just have put a watermark on every frame; then people would be directed to their site even by old, broken videos. And I don't think they should complain too much anyway; I know that more than one media outlet found them through my blog, and they want the exposure.
They have removed it from everywhere because they only want people to see it at Revver.Com then they get paid for every view am thinking of doing the same with my “pepsi girl” how much would 3 million views have netted me.
That is just not, repeat, NOT gonna happen. People have already seen it; they should have put their hopes in any business model other than pay per view; video is just not secure on the Web, obviously, and now the vid is past it’s sell-by date. I give it a day or so before it shows up on MSN.com, which means it’s officially over. They should have used the video to get publicity for their public performances or something. That would be a business model; pay per view isn’t.
Besides, they embedded Eepybird.com in the video; they should have publicized the destination URL they were making money off. Silly people.
I know one of these guys personally. They did not expect it to go viral, though there is always that hope. The fact that they didn’t protect/imbed/watermark doesn’t mean that everyone should enjoy free use. It’s a free view at revver but they do get a small revenue. The vid here has a youtube watermark. That’s just wrong. If I leave my house unlocked it might be silly. but it doen’t mean my stuff is yours to use any time
(and I want my blue Jim Morrison shirt back please)
Enjoy the vid. Give them their due.
Tog
Pepsi girl, I found your video through the link from eepybird.com I don’t think the actual revenue from revver paid Steve and Fritz for all the coke+mentos.
BTW with the copyright discussion. Steve Voltz is a nice guy, but he’s also a lawyer!
Tog
Fair enough. I’ll now put the link to the revver site in the post as an update. Youtube watermarks ALL their videos. Can you blame me for posting it in the first place, given that the original article linked to it there? As far as I knew it was A-OK. And yes, its moment has passed. When I said they should have embedded a watermark I didn’t mean that would PROTECT IT (only an assertion of copyright notice would do that) but rather that it would be an effective method of promoting themselves and driving people to their own website.
If you read all the comments here, you’ll find the Pepsi girl video right up at the top, from almost a month ago. The author doesn’t seem to be getting any revenues from revver.com, so who is?
Very fair, thanks.
Just saw Steve and Fritz live on Letterman. At least they’ll get perfromer fees from that. Pepsi girl. I love your video too. Great work.but might be hard to recreate on Letterman…
Tog
Indeed. None of us wants to see human sacrifice on Letterman, unless it involves Republicans.
Congrats to the Mad Scientists on their Letterman appearance. If you can survive Dave, you can survive anything!
Turns out Revver allows embedding. It’s not compatible with WordPress, or I’d post it here; my understanding is that they get revenues for every click even if it’s embedded off-site. My friend Raj has it on his site, and I posted about that here:
https://raincoaster.wordpress.com/2006/06/30/mentos-and-diet-coke-20/
Just judging from the nosedive the hits have taken, I suppose that something has happened to push them off the radar. Weird, from 78 hits to 14 in one day. Something’s up.
Hi just came back to see what went on after my comment, The date you saw may last comment was the day i put my vid up at revver. “Pepsi Girl” it did pretty well there am pleased to say VERY well. Tho not eepybird well.
Eepy bird had already cleared $25k and in the following 2 weeks from 20th June another $15k as from then till NOW I dont know but despite the views dropping off, it is only a gradual thing.
Revver does work if you can attract your own traffic, revver is not really a “destination” site, s you say the power is embedding a “Revvered” video on your page then driving traffic to that.
Cheers everyone.
Excellent! I do get hits looking for Pepsi Girl, so put a link in here and we’ll post it.
Unfortunately, we can’t embed Revver video on a wordpress blog, or I’d do that.
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Parece que en Coca Cola no están contentos con el boom que está teniendo el popular experimento de los Mentos. Las ventas de los caramelos se han disparado y según leo en IBL News la empresa”…que no invierte más de 20 millones de dólares en publicidad al año, estima que las apariciones en medios y su difusión en la Red equivale a una inversión de unos 10 millones de dólares…” Resulta que existe un video-performance de 10 minutos de duración en el que se utilizan 101 botellas de Diet Coke y más de 500 pastillas de Mentos… un vídeo que han difundido a bombo y platillo por la mayoría de televisiones estadounidenses por su espectacularidad. total, que los responsables de marketing de Mentos han anunciado que contactaran con los “artistas” porque no descartan organizar un espectáculo de grandes dimensiones para promocionar los caramelos. Yo me pregunto… ¿utilizaran coca cola? El experimento de los geisers funciona con cualquier bebida carbonatada, pero aunque desde coca cola afirmen que preferirían que la gente bebiera en lugar de experimentar… no descarto una alianza porque al fin y al cabo se beneficiarían ambos… El mundo está loco, y si dudabais del poder de la publicidad y de Internet, podeis comprobar que estabais 100% equivocados. Si quereis ver una pequeña muestra del potencial del experimento, os recomiendo este video http://raincoaster.wordpress.com/2006/06/04/101-bottles-of-diet-coke-523-mentos-2-mad-scientists/ [...]
[...] Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz were the famed mad scientists whose hypnotic Aesthetic of the Absurd video, covered extensively in this blog and millions of others, set the tone for memes to come, from the inexorable rise of lolcats up to and including Anonymous’s current campaign against Scientology. [...]