Look And Laugh At This Fake 'We Bought A Zoo' Twitter Account
by Sean Comer
Like great taxidermy, it's so life-like, and so resembles the real thing. It's even got almost as many followers as the real "We Bought a Zoo" Twiter account. But look closer, and things as obvious as visible stitching and cracked glass eyes let you know something's clearly up.
According to the Los Angeles Times' showbiz blog Company Town, this phony-baloney social networking home went live on Wednesday, complete a nice wallpaper employing the family-friendly Matt Damon-Scrarlett Johansson comedy's sunny poster.
But look closer at @WEBOUGHTAZ00 and compare it with 20th Century Fox's @weboughtazoo. For starters, it's using zeroes as O's in the all-caps title. Second, it's apparently rooted in "Elizaboothtown."
Third, its 1,702 followers is actual gaining on the official account's 2,270.
Fourth, the description of @WEBOUGHTAZ00 asks "Whose idea was this? Honestly?"
And finally, and this is just a guess here, but there's little chance Johansson wouldn't have frowned at least a little upon tweets like "We have so many cages to clean and Scarlett won't stop sexting."
Another that reads "My daughter keeps asking why we bought a zoo and all I can say is, 'Wait for the movie because I don't want to spoil it!' She has swine flu" is actually pretty funny.
Account originators Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber didn't immediately answer Company Town's request for a comment explaining why they created the mock-up, nor did 20th Century Fox make a statement on it.
It's probably a good thing 20th Century Fox isn't commenting. It's been cast into enough unpleasant press. It's bad enough that semi-disgraced New Yorker film critic David Denby explained to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" producer Scott Rudin that he black-balled himself from future critics screenings by breaking an agreed Dec. 13 embargo on early reviews because he essentially would rather have broken his word to a trusted source than review "We Bought A Zoo."
That fact is made all the funnier knowing Rudin essentially replied to that defense that he couldn't care less about "We Bought a Zoo" or the fact that Denby really, really didn't want to see it.