Jaeger Designer

Confirmed 77,098

About

The Jaeger Designer is an online application created by Warner Brothers to promote the 2013 science fiction film Pacific Rim directed by Guillermo del Toro, in which humans pilot gigantic humanoid mechas called Jaegers to fight against colossal monsters. Following its release and coverage by various websites in May and June of 2013, many fans used it to generate non-serious Jaegers using a variety of humorous phrases and nationality stereotypes.

Origin

Pacific Rim^[3] is a 2013 American science fiction film directed by Guillermo del Toro and released by the American film production company Legendary Pictures, which was first premiered in London on July 4th and later followed by an American release on July 12th. The film is set in the 2020s, when Earth is under attack by colossal monsters called Kaiju. To fight these monsters humanity has created gigantic humanoid mechas called Jaegers. To promote the film, Warner Bros added a Jaeger Designer app^[1] to the official site^[2] on May 11th, 2013, which allowed users to customize their own Jaegers alongside given them a name and a country of origin.

Spread

On May 11th, the same day as the release of the app, it was covered by various websites such as CrunchyRoll,^[5] MovieViral^[9] and Collider.^[10] They were followed in late May and throughout June by other websites such as ComicbookMovie,^[12] Hitfix,^[13] Slashfilm,^[7] ThisIsInfamous^[14] and Mashable^[19] when Warner Bros expanded the features of the designer such as with the addition of a custom game. A page for the designer was also added to the Pacific Rim Wikia^[20] on May 27th. On June 18th, IGN^[6] announced a Jaeger design contest in cooperation with Guillermo del Toro, the director of the film, in which the winner would win a 3D-Printer valued at $2,500 (shown below).

On July 9th, 2013, the 4th String Jaegers^[15] single topic blog was created, which focussed on posting custom made non-serious Jaegers. On July 8th, Tumblr user Kris Straub^[16] made a post showing a collection of 3 Jaegers with vulgar names including "Diarrhea Touchdown" and "Padawan Dickshark". On July 9th, the 4th String Jaegers blog created a post^[17] using a GIF animation of a dancing Jaeger called "Bust A Move" which was created by Twitter user @CantWearHats.^[18] The same day Tumblr user Fadeintocase also made a post^[8] containing 6 Jaegers using a collection of pun jokes based on country names (shown below). As of July 17th, 2013, the 3 posts gained respectively more than 3,500; 3,000 and 5,800 notes.

On July 12th, 2013, Uproxx created an article^[11] covering the custom Jaegers made by Kris Straub^[16] and expanded on the idea with some of their own creations. Uproxx made additional follow-ups to this article on July 13th^[21] using ideas made by the site's commenters and on July 17th^[22] using posts made by the 4th String Jaegers^[15] blog. On July 16th, Buzzfeed^[23] and GiantFreakingRobot^[4] also made articles covering the various custom Jaegers made by fans.