Golden Spam Cans to Promote Python Musical

Eibwen writes "For the upcoming release of Monty Python's Spamalot, Hormel foods is giving the first 100 customers who purchase a ticket a golden can of honey grail spam."

-1 offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this in the IT section?

Bravo, Hormel

[dcarey]

In this day of over-sensitivity, political correctness, and people/corporations sueing at every possible interval, it's great to see the makers of the dreaded Spam yuck it up with laughter, turning a positive light on the fact that they are the butt of many jokes. In fact, they are probably laughing all the way to the bank ...

Re:first spam?

[Rirath.com]

It's rather nice to see a company embrace the humor at any rate. Heck, these days I'd almost except to see Hormel suing Python claiming they damaged the name or something equally ridiculous.

It's called "Self Effacing Humor"

[RenaissanceGeek]

We here in Minnesota (the home of Hormel, and thus, of Spam) as rather well known for our ability to make fun of ourselves; just look at Garrison Kellior and "A Prarie Home Companion" (a radio program broadcast by mostly public stations on Saturday evenings and Sunday at midday.) One of the most popular recurring characters is "Guy Noir, private-eye", who suffers through horrible embarassments in the course of his (not very successful) practice, and somehow always muddles through without taking it out on anyone else.

Like that, the people at Hormel understand that all of the Spam humor isn't REALLY directed at them, so why not have a little fun with it, doncha' know?

Re:for those of you wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't the wife just get the egg and bacon or the egg sausage and bacon?

Bah. I can get all the spam I want here on /.

[physicsphairy]

[e-mail] The interesting thing is that the spammers will actually drop my email from their lists in a couple of days. Apparently, they purge their lists of emails that contain the word 'spam' under the (generally correct) presumption that these are junk accounts. So, if tradition holds, I'll get some spam for the next few days and in a week it will taper off to nothing.

Wrong logo

[wowbagger]

Really, instead of the squared-off pig logo, this is one of the few times the old SPAM can logo would have been correct.

And I too congratulate Hormel for their attitude on this - they really have taken the appropriation of their trademark pretty damn well.

Most companies would have hired kneecappers to hunt down the Python troop for what they've done.

Re:Yes, but will they EAT it?

[vivian]

When you are in the middle of nowhere and it's been raining for the last week and everyting in your kit is soaked, it's a wonderful thing to have a can of spam and a hexamine stove to fry it up on. Spam's a lot tastier than the mystery stew you get in the other cans in the ration packs. Best of all you can convince the other younger guys it tastes horrible and get them to leave it all for you.

Re:Such a change of heart!

[AndroidCat]

Not a change of heart at all. They just don't want people mis-using their trademark (otherwise they lose it) in a product name. They've allowed the general use of spam (lowercase only) to refer to email abuse, since they can't turn back the tide. In this case, they're handing out cans of SPAM in a promotion with a comedy group who did a routine involving SPAM, so there's no confusion about which and whose product SPAM refers to in this case.

Re:for those of you wondering...

[alext]

Nothing harms a cause more than overstating it.

To pretend that "just about anything" in Python was unoriginal is no more convincing than saying it appeared from nowhere.

Not a single sketch, character or even line in Python is directly derived from The Goon Show. In fact the two shows are very different in format and comic style, character-led stories vs. sketches etc. Both are vaguely absurdist, which was novel at the time, and no doubt Spike Milligan had some influence on the Pythons in other ways, but that's about as close as it gets.