Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
- All aboard the Gucci Pink Express bound for an Amar (and AI) reimagined Heathrow - September 13, 2024
- Eating cats and dogs in media land - September 11, 2024
- Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone - September 7, 2024
I watch the clouds go sailing
I watch the clock and sun
Oh I watch myself depending on
September when it comes
– Rosanne Cash, When September Comes
August’s final stanza is over but the band plays on. As 2024 races by with almost unseemly speed, we get set for the usual September frenzy of pre-Cannes (and in our case pre-Trinity Forum) show preparation.
For years, TFWA World Exhibition & Conference took place in late October – I know because it always meant I missed half-term break and, worse, my younger son’s birthday. It’s only as you get older and you cannot undo such tallies that you count them and their related cost.
But now the show happens across late September and early days of October. Thus tomorrow, 2 September, my email inbox will transform Dr Bruce Banner-like into a latter-day remake called The Incredible Bulk.
Agency after agency, brand after brand will swamp us with press releases promoting their clients’ presence in Cannes. Many will relate in dizzying detail what will happen on the stands in question down to the colours of the flooring, the male executives’ socks or their female counterparts’ lipsticks. OK, I exaggerate but only just.
Those agencies and brands are simply doing their job, however, and we must never forget we are fortunate enough to be the preferred platform on which to promote such narratives. And then there is the Matterhorn-like pile of interviews and other features I and my great colleagues have to pump out to fill our various magazines (print and digital) that punctuate the lead-up to Cannes like spike strips on a road.
So, if I’m slower than usual in responding to an email or whatsapp message over the next few weeks, you’ll know I’m grappling with the sequel to that 2008 Marvel Pictures film.
In the movie, of course, Dr Banner turns green when – due to earlier exposure to gamma radiation – his heart rate rises above 200 beats per minute. But did you know that Stan Lee, who created the character for a Marvel comic in 1962, originally envisioned a grey-skinned Hulk? Incredible, huh?
According to the Goethe-Institut’s excellent online magazine Fehler (German for mistake), Lee chose grey because he didn’t want to imply any association with a particular ethnic group and because he wanted a colour that would appear “scary and chilling”. For the latter reason, I suppose, parallel trading is known as the grey, not green, market.
Then came the fehler. And would you believe, it was all down to a printing error? In that first 1962 comic, the colours failed to match the originals supplied by the colourist Stan Goldberg (another Stan, more on that in a moment), no doubt leading to a hue and cry at the publishing house.
The great mistake – believed to have inspired a similarly named American World War II movie starring Steve McQueen as a POW in which his original choice of a Springstab or pogo stick as choice of escape vehicle was accidently translated as motorbike (OK, I made that bit up but you have to admit, he would have got over the barbed wire with a pogo stick) – can be explained thus, the Goethe-Institut explains.
“If in CMYK printing the colour grey is desired but green is produced instead, it’s most likely because the press density is either too light on magenta or too heavy on a combination of cyan and yellow.”
Press density? Tell me about it. Anyway, when Lee saw his superhero had a greenish shimmer in that first published edition, he quite liked it. And so, from edition two, Dr Bruce Banner’s alter ego would turn green whenever his heart went boom bang-a-bang, boom bang-a-bang loud in his ear.
In the end it was no great fehler. In fact, the antihero generated more than a billion dollars in character licensing fees following his change of tincture. No wonder Lee used to go around singing ‘For he’s a jolly green fehler’ each year on the anniversary of his character’s creation*.
There are way too many grey markets, I mean parallels to this story for comfort but then again, I have always been prone to diversion. And diverted I indeed was this morning when I opened The Moodie Davitt Report.com, the monster of my own creation, ‘The website that never sleeps’.
I discovered, as I hope you will, that the website had turned green. Greener than grass; greener than Kermit the Frog (long since croaked); greener than the Boston Celtics; greener than a Springboks rugby jumper (on which subject that will be quite enough, thank you); heck, greener than The Incredible Hulk.
How could this be? Had the stress of all those words, that press density, transformed my creation? Well, actually no. It was beer that did it. Not any ordinary beer but Heineken, the much-loved, much-travelled, much-poured Dutch brew.
Heineken has partnered with The Moodie Davitt Report this week for one of the most striking – and certainly greenest – ‘makeovers’ of our desktop homepage ever seen. The aim is to promote the brand’s presence in Cannes and publicise a challenge to delegates to deliver the ‘perfect pour’ of a cold Heineken and win Champions League semi-final tickets (I reckon I’m in with a great chance of winning, after all I’ve improved many a poor draft in my years as an editor).
The commonalities with The Incredible Hulk don’t end there. I’m going to conclude with a confession, one I have hidden from readers like a dark family secret all these years.
You see, like Messrs Lee and Goldberg, my first name is Stan. As in Stanley (not Stan Lee) Martin Middleton Moodie. The boys in my family all had Stanley as their first name over numerous generations, ever since the Moodies moved from Glasgow to Canada in the 18th century. My brothers are all called Stanley as was my father and grandfather before him ad infinitum. Even my sister had a close escape. Fortunately we all used our second name or it would have got mighty confusing around the dinner table.
As I neither like nor use the name (I ended the tradition by sparing both my sons), I am going to inflict it instead on The Incredible Bulk of workload I face in coming weeks. Stan it is. And Stan must be overcome. And when I am done I shall toast Dr Bruce Banner with Champagne. Non vintage, of course. And not too much. Just enough to make him green with NV. 
*OK, I made that up too.