Things Are Better When Multiplied by 1000

Move Over, The Fast and the Furious, there's a new king of the racing movie genre in town:

Note that this movie is not a remake of the 1975 Sylvester Stallone classic shown below (but does seem to draw on it for conceptual inspiration):

Incidentally, the latter flick makes me wax nostalgic for the twilight years of the 20th century, when arbitrarily appending a large multiple of 1000 to the title of something was a trendy way to invoke futurism and instantaneously imbue said something with highly sophisticated, larger-than-life qualities that vaguely suggested omnipotence in a dues ex machina kind of way.

Notable examples of this phenomenon include the following:

• As the great Local News Wars of the 1990s reached their glorious apex, Channel 8 of Portland (Oregon, naturally) decided to christen one of their weather maps Doppler 8000 in an attempt to convince people that they possessed a technologically superior way of forecasting precipitation in the greater Portland area (which, as any resident of that city knows, is extremely challenging, inasmuch as you don't know whether the rain will arrive before or after noontime). In response, rival Channel 6, taking a considerably more comprehensive approach, renamed itelf to Channel 6000. This change may have been confusing to some viewers, as 6000 was not a valid channel on anyone's cable box.



• In 1999, as Microsoft prepared to release the successor to the Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems, a savvy marketer observed that neither "Windows 00" nor "Windows NT 5.0" were very inspiring names; thus was born Windows 2000. To appeal to less sophisticated users (who might be put off by the added sophistication of a 1000-level version number), Microsoft in parallel launched a dumbed-down, friendlier-but-still-futuristic-sounding version of Windows 2000 called Windows Millennium Edition (or "Windows Me"). However, Windows Me's lack of support for popular legacy hardware and software (sound familiar?) and its general inability to connect to the Internet doomed it out of the box -- why wasn't it called Windows 00? -- and it was quickly buried two years later by the widescale adoption of Windows XP.



• In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XII, the Ultrahouse 3000 (voiced by Pierce Brosnan) pays homage to the line of homicidal computer systems that started with the HAL-9000 found in Arthur C. Clarke's signature work, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This example provides an excellent opportunity for me to mention that my refrigerator is adorned with a circular magnet fashioned after one of HAL's eyes, so that I can derive considerable pleasure from shouting "Open the door, HAL!!" whenever I want a beer.
  
  
  
  
  (It's probably worth noting that my fridge has yet to respond with "I'm afraid I can't do that.")

So, marketing professionals of the world: when you're feeling uninspired about a brand name and your deadline is looming, just multiply your best idea by a few thousand and call it a day. If you need some extra oomph, try adding a random Greek letter or two. And, when in doubt, finishing everything with bunch of exclamation marks never hurts.

This summer, slow and steady will not win...
DEATH RACE 8000πΩθΔβ!!!!!