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It’s 1974. You’re strapped into a makeshift rocket pointed directly upwards. You’re staring straight at the sky. Pretty much all you can see is blue, although you can just about make out the canyon somewhere beneath you - the one you’re about to jump. On a bike. You can see nothing else below you or beside you. The only way is up. Don’t fancy it? Tough. You’re on national television, you’re Evel Knievel, and there’s no going back.
Although he witnessed death defying stunts at a young age, Robert Craig Jnr. Knievel didn't set out on a single-minded mission to become the greatest ever daredevil of all time. In fact, you’d almost say 'daredevilism' came as a kind of last resort for a man who, for the life of him, couldn’t find a way to maintain a regular income. And he was forever getting into trouble. During his younger years, Knievel was thrown into jail for all manner of things, from reckless driving and burglary, to leading poachers into Yellowstone National Park to guarantee game. No surprise, then, that Knievel acquired ‘Evel’ as a name precisely because he regularly hopped and skipped on the wrong side of good. At one point he tried selling insurance to mental patients and, having invited the Czechoslovakian ice hockey team over to play in the US prior to the Olympics, proceeded to rob them after the game. From the off, then, Knievel was far from the all action, do no wrong American hero as history would have us believe.
But the political climate of the 60s and 70s meant that America needed someone to cheer for, something to cling on to, a hero to promote. Step forward a man trying to make ends meet, a man desperate to turn his back on the crime, misfortune and failure that had dogged his life thus far. In 1960, Evel turned to motorcycles and founded his own bike shop, and it was here that, through a single stunt designed to inflate interest around an average shop, his eager entrepreneurial radar discovered people’s insatiable appetite for danger. He jumped 40 feet on a motorcycle over 100 rattle snakes and a pair of mountain lions, as you do - his back wheel landing on the very edge of the landing strip - and so begun one of the strangest celebrity careers of the 20th Century. (Imagine the route his life might have taken had that wheel landed the wrong side).
On New Year’s Eve, 1967, Knievel cleared the fountains outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in front of 25,000 people and television cameras broadcasting the event across the nation but suffered horrendous injuries and spent the next month in a coma (see clip in the film below). He awoke a hero. But, while the words ‘Evel’ and ‘Knievel’ have become synonymous with heroism, danger and determination, his was a life wedged between periods of extreme failure, drug abuse and alcoholism. Eight years of success post-1967 were followed by a gradual decline, beginning with the jump over shark infested waters that culminated in a badly injured photographer, and then his assault on Sheldon Saltman after the biographer had revealed Evel’s drug taking habits and neglect for his family. He is said to have had an accomplice hold Saltman down while he beat him so hard with a baseball bat that the bone in the writer’s arm broke through the skin. Evel was predictably reacquainted with prison as a result - six months no less - and Saltman sued him for a whopping $13 million. From that moment on, the American public’s love affair with their hero was on the wane. He was no longer their defiant champion - a latter day American idol - but rather a sad and delirious social misfit, soon to be forgotten, just as quickly as he’d been catapulted into the public’s collective consciousness; on his way into prison he boasted, in all seriousness, that once out, he would jump from the underside of an aeroplane at 30,000 feet - with no parachute - and land on a giant haystack in a Las Vegas car park. Imagine the mess had he got his bearings even slightly wrong.
Despite his failings, though, there was undoubtedly a period in his life when Knievel had the imaginations of a loving public gripped like wet trunks in a mangle. He did something about the things he saw in his head - motorcycles flying high over snapping sharks and hungry lions - and he actually made it happen. Strap yourself to a rocket-like motorcycle in a bid to clear Snake River Canyon? Why the hell not. Even the crimes he committed owe something to an overly active imagination. But he came up short precisely, it seems, because he lacked the one thing many people presume he had in abundance: the determination to endure. “A man can fall many, many times in life,” he said, “but he is not a failure until he refuses to get up.”
Lunatic, yes, but determined? Perhaps not.
Magenta. We love it. It’s had something of a renaissance these last few years. It’s like those batwing tops women are wearing again which enable them, in tight situations, to jump off buildings and float to safety like the Dark Knight himself.
Yes, Magenta is back, and has been for some time now. But there’s a chance it will be taken away from us by that malevolent b*****d T-Mobile. They claim ownership of the colour in Europe. No one else can use it, they say. Ban us from using one of our most beloved creative tools? O2 monopolise the iPhone, and now this?
We will not be moved. Rebel here.
Yes, Magenta is back, and has been for some time now. But there’s a chance it will be taken away from us by that malevolent b*****d T-Mobile. They claim ownership of the colour in Europe. No one else can use it, they say. Ban us from using one of our most beloved creative tools? O2 monopolise the iPhone, and now this?
We will not be moved. Rebel here.
Freddie and Hollie are a pair of young and imaginative Londoners, plying their trade in advertising, who also run their own blog on the side where they post up ideas they think could make a difference, however small. Anything goes - it’s just a bunch of ideas in need of the determination to make them real; apparently Freddie and Hollie don’t have time. There’s a web widget that changes the colour of popular websites so you don’t get busted at work; a Poppy ‘gift’ on Facebook to raise funds for the appeal (can’t believe they didn’t do this); recycling ideas for piles of freesheets polluting the capital’s streets; and my favourite, a direct mail idea for Sony’s ‘Colour Like No Other’ campaign which involves sending brightly coloured bin bags to one city street so that, when rubbish day comes around (assuming people remember - we often forget!), the street comes alive.
