A loyal ZRC correspondent forwarded this to us on Twitter the other day and I was once again surprised by just how much Zombie-Unfriendly mischief people can get up to using Youtube:

The Zombie Temp Worker is a comedy series created by PopCap and released on Youtube. It features an employee from PopCap dressed as a Zombie running around the office building and other properties of the company causing mischief and humor. It featured 9 episodes in all to this date. The series arguably ended in Bejeweled 3 where the Zombie Temp Worker got stuck in the ground because of a falling blue diamond.

Yes, in order to promote Plants vs. Zombies, PopCap decided to have an employee ‘dressed’ as a Zombie (ie, one of the most common Zombie units from their game, replete with an enormous cartoonish head on top) star in a ‘humorous’ series of videos.

Most of which consist of jokes at the ‘Zombie’s expense.

Jokes like: ‘Zombies are slow-witted and can’t perform simple tasks.’

Or: ‘Zombies are unpleasant to share a meal with.’

We expected no less from the company that continues to employ known-Zombophobe Stephen Notley.

Still, in spite of themselves, we think PopCap accidentally created some sympathy for their Zombie stand-in character, as reflected by one of their videos in the series, ‘Rise and Shine’:

Zombies are people too, and the video mostly reflects this. Zombies have to get through Unlife day to day, basically the same as Living people, and this daily routine narrative helps to illustrate that point… even though I seriously doubt that was PopCap’s intention.

Sadly as noted in the above description, when the time came to move on to the next promotion their Zombie star was cruelly and abruptly discarded, showing once again the pervasive Anti-Zombie culture at the game developer:

Yes, that’s what PopCap needed, to bring MORE Anti-Zombie violence into the world, and on Youtube no less where anyone can stumble across it, even by accident, even children.

Shocking and very irresponsible, I have to say. Par for the course for PopCap though.

Tags: Advertising, Videogames, Youtube Mischief

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, May 7th, 2011 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.