From Chris Ayres in Los Angeles
See here.
IT BEGINS with a caricature of Al Gore — grossly overweight and dressed like a Victorian industrialist — pointing an umbrella at an overhead screen of climate data.
DOUG
They missed the reference here. Gore is dressed as the Penguin (Oswald Cobblepot), played by Danny DeVito, from the 1992 movie Batman Returns.
The former vice-president’s audience is made up of cartoon penguins, who — in spite of the increasingly balmy conditions in Antarctica – snore at his global-warming lecture and fantasise about going to see X-Men 3.
“What is Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, all about?” reads the video’s description on YouTube.com, where it was posted.
“Global Warming? The Environment? Or something much more BORING? See Al Gore’s Penguin Army learn how crazy this flick really is . . .”
The maker of the Gore-baiting spoof is credited as Toutsmith, a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills, California. The video appears to have been produced on a home computer, with a budget of pennies. But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Toutsmith is actually operating from Washington, on a computer registered to a PR company called DCI Group. The company’s clients happen to include the multinational oil company ExxonMobil.
The YouTube mystery comes as Mr Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary that combines classroom science with blatant self-promotion, continues to draw surprisingly large audiences. In spite of the film showing at only 587 cinemas across America, it has made more than $20 million (£10.5 million). “We, like everyone else on the planet, have seen (the YouTube video) but did not fund it, did not approve it, and did not know what its source was,” said a spokesman for Exxon.
As for DCI Group, the company has declined to comment on the spoof, saying only: “DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients’ behalf.”
