Totally un-bogus shoes, dude.

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder & Fusion Director, Atomic Tango LLC

“If we don’t get some cool rules pronto, we’ll be bogus, too!”
– Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

It was one of those Big Bang moments in pop culture: a single work launches careers and trends while capturing the ‘tude of a whole generation…

The 1982 film Fast Times At Ridgemont High featured Sean Penn in a breakout role that spawned hundreds of Hollywood slackers, from Bill & Ted to Beavis & Butthead to most of the characters in Jud Apatow’s movies. Penn’s Jeff Spicoli wore checkerboard Vans sneakers, turning them into instant icons. And the screenplay was written by Cameron Crowe, who went on to create other culture shaping films, including Say Anything and Jerry Maguire. With all the pieces in place, Fast Times was crude and adolescent  creative genius.

Now, a quarter-of-a-century later, I’ve created this marketing-and-media blog named after the film’s most quotable line, which is a joint-production of both Crowe and Penn. Crowe’s original script reads, “If we don’t come up with some cool rules ourself…”; Penn then swaps in the oh-so-critical “pronto” for “ourself,” demonstrating the inestimable value of a single word.

My goal with this blog is to promote other acts of pure inspiration in an increasingly cluttered mediascape, with a focus on advertising and marketing. I will be brutally critical, I will be tongue in cheek, I will be anything but professional in my search for other “cool rules” in marketing and media. Note that these are not “best practices,” to be followed or imitated; they are examples of creative inspiration that will hopefully inspire more Big Bang moments. We can’t all be as culturally influential as Spicoli, but we should give it one hell of a shot.