Esurance (found Speed Racer movie tie-in commercial from insurance company; 2008)

Promotional image for Esurance's Speed Racer tie-in.

Status: Found

Date found: 2 Sep 2022

Among the sponsorship deals arranged for Lana and Lily Wachowski's 2008 film adaptation of Speed Racer was with American online insurance company Esurance. Their tie-in website, which can no longer be found and even less fortunately, was not recovered by the Wayback Machine, hosted behind-the-scenes interviews, wallpapers, film clips, renders and sweepstakes, the grand prize winner earning a two-night stay in Los Angeles and a tour of the Warner Bros. Studios.^[1] Part of Esurance's tie-in was a TV commercial, directed by Chris Hauge for WildBrain, which saw their controversial animated mascot Erin Esurance driving a pink moped to the film's premiere. Despite of this strategy, Speed Racer made around $100 million less than its budget on opening weekend and received lukewarm reception from critics. However, it would receive a gradual cult interest among critics and fans following its release, its style, in particular, being influential to filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

The character of Erin was retired in 2010, due to a declining interest and gratuitous association with internet pornography, which took up the majority of online image search results for the character.

Availability

This commercial was available on YouTube for a brief period of time but was removed and supposedly never recovered since. A high-quality copy of the commercial was embedded via Vimeo onto the official website for Halo Pictures, Hauge's production company,^[2] but although the website is still online, all videos featured were unwittingly privatized at one point in 2011 by Hauge, the Speed Racer commercial included, with no means of access. As a result, this was the only known Esurance commercial in the Erin campaign to have not resurfaced as of November 2018. The closest this ad could come to a full resurface was in the form of stills captured by fan David Alan Ward.

On July 6th, 2021, a 12-second cut of the commercial recovered from Halo's website was uploaded to YouTube by user theok25.

On September 2nd, 2022, YouTuber slickbluesuede uploaded a commercial compilation shown during a broadcast of WWE ECW on Sci-Fi from May 2nd, 2008 to their channel. Among the commercials featured was the full Esurance Speed Racer commercial, which can be seen below.