National Television
In December of 2015, Dumb Drum was invited on Good Morning America to talk about our sweded FORCE AWAKENS video and we were surprised by the producers with some feedback from a couple of the cast members of the actual film.
One morning, at about 4 a.m., while most of the Western U.S. is asleep, ABC World News aired this segment where they talked about our video. The commentary from the anchors was quite unusual but hey, we'll take any kind of mention on a national stage, even if only the East coast was awake.
The producers for the nationally syndicated show INSIDE EDITION reached out to us to interview the crew for our STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS swede. If you, for some reason, were wondering "I wonder how Roque would look on TV running on 3 hours sleep?" well first: that's weird. But second, you're in luck!
Dumb Drum was featured on ABC’s LOCALISH series, talking about our Star Wars swede and an overview of Swede Fest. Take a glimpse in our Swede Lab (my garage) and some more BTS footage from our production.
New York Magazine
In March of 2015, writer Alex Yablon from New York Magazine published a story on Dumb Drum and our sweded trailers as part of a special feature about fan culture. To this day I wonder how many regular readers picked that issue up, read the headline for our story and thought "Where the hell is Fresno?" You can read the full story here.
Photo by Valerie Ramsey
Hollywood
A couple of months before the theatrical release of PACIFIC RIM in March, 2013, Oscar-winning director of the film Guillermo Del Toro (SHAPE OF WATER, PAN'S LABYRINTH) was participating on a panel at Wondercon in Anaheim, California. As he was preparing to show a new trailer for the film to a sea of nerds, he took a moment to call our sweded trailer a "masterpiece." If you listen closely, you might be able to hear my head explode amongst the crowd's somewhat confused applause (NSFW language).
After the panel, we met with the Del Toro who was absolutely delighted by our appearance, encouraging us to loudly replicated the opening sound of the Jager together, before giving us a huge bear hug. After we chatted for a while, Del Toro ended up inviting us to the Hollywood premiere of the film in July and were his guests at the afterparty. A few months later we were contacted by Legendary to create some original content to help promote the home video release of the film. We produced and delivered a few videos to the studio which they used on various social media channels, some of which you can see here as well an an interview we did for their website.
NPR's MORNING EDITION story
In 2011, after our Avengers swede became a success, NPR reached out to us to talk about our little film festival in Fresno. In the story they also interviewed Michel Gondry (inventor of the concept of "sweding") about Swede Fest – thereby achieving a goal we dared not speak aloud.
Famous Tweets
Sometimes, after releasing our videos on the internet, we've been lucky enough to have been blessed with positive reinforcement via Twitter from the actual creators of the stuff we're knocking off. Woo-hoo! Oh, and in Nick Cannon's case, just some random celebrity who probably has too much time on his hands. But it's okay because Nick Cannon's hilarious, dad.