Birdman, Or The Unexplained Virtue Of Ignorance is riding high off the wave of the Best Picture prize it scored at Sunday night's Oscars. So what better way to cap off that win than to capitalize with, in the immortal words of Yogurt The Wise, "Merchandising, Merchandising, Merchandising!" Check out the commercial for the Birdman action figure you didn't know you wanted until now, right below this very paragraph.
Fox Searchlight dropped this video on their YouTube channel, which embraces the faux 90's aesthetic that the Birdman Returns trailer previously embraced. Thankfully, instead of just a collection of stock toy commercial footage, this spot was filmed in the here and now, only to be retro dirtied up, and they did a pretty good job of keeping with the time period before the dirtying process.
So what does the Birdman action figure do? Well, for a fictional toy not much, apparently. As a major superhero tie-in, the figure lacks the two standard features of any toy of its ilk: fully pose-able limbs, and some sort of moving appendage that requires you to press the button in its back repeatedly. What it lacks in action, though, it certainly makes up for with its speech capabilities. That's right, you can listen to Riggan Thomson recite your favorite lines from Birdman! Lines like, "Smells like balls," "Now that's what I'm talking about," and – our favorite, "We should have done that reality show," all come to life with a press of a button. This is starting to look more and more like one of those action figures your older brother would keep on the shelf above his bed... next to those tapes he made you swear not to tell Mom about while she's cleaning.
Meanwhile in reality, we don't have a Birdman action figure to call our own, at least not in mass quantities. Fox Searchlight had a limited run made while the film was in theaters, but it wouldn't be a complete surprise if the Best Picture win spurred some sort of second issue, or even better, a more widespread release of the figure that's built to, "defeat Birdman's arch-nemesis The Condor." Believe it or not, that huge bird creature in the movie had a name! We must not have heard it over The Condor's mighty roar, or the deafening drum solo that is Riggan Thomson's ego. So cheer up, Michael Keaton! While Eddie Redmayne may have won Best Actor at the Oscars, you have something Mr. Redmayne doesn't have... an action figure!
Birdman, Or The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance is on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD now; despite Howard Stern's best wishes.
