The post made by you Charlie came off as a little pompous. I, as well as many others, appreciate your down to earth humor and humility. So what if REM pulled of a shitty remake of your gag, you don’t need to bust chops about it..it makes you guys look like your “celebrity” status is getting to your head. Thanks for mentioning your youtube views by the way.. common’, unnecessary.

Just stick to creating and sharing your great pranks… remember you are ordinary guys and gals doing absurd things in everyday life. Don’t over commercialize this, or worse, turn into a money hungry comedy troupe with big egos.

All the best… and seriously, keep the pranks coming, you guys are great… and we all know it already.
- Geoff

(And I don’t see any addition of concept in “getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area.”)

We never claimed to invent the idea of freezing in place. I’m sure a caveman froze in place as a gag. What I said in the post was that we started the current worldwide phenomenon of “getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area.” It’s happened in over 27 countries and it’s all been inspired by our Frozen Grand Central video which has almost 10 million views on YouTube. So sure, Just For Laughs had 1 to 3 people freeze in place at a time in a grocery store many years ago for their television show, but I don’t really think that’s relevant to what happened here with R.E.M.

As noted above, the people who run the “remhq” YouTube channel apologized to us and added a credit to the video description. That’s good enough for us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2wsY2Uws5k&feature=related

And heres a link about the show.

http://www.tv.com/just-for-laughs/show/28387/summary.html

it aired from 1987 to 1998 so the prank is minimum of 10 years old and I doubt it was a new idea when they came up with it.

The link i provided was from a prank T.V show that was on and was at least 5 years ago when it was aired,so it was marketed.

I watched it on T.V back then and it was the first thing that I directly remembered after I read this.Thats why I was able to find it so quickly off of youtube.

I seen a few others on youtube as well before I found that one, but I’ll go ahead and try to find the name of that show and the original air date.It ran re-runs for several years on Comcast cable channel 9 here in the U.S so it’s also pretty likely that at least one member of IE would have seen it before.It was my favorite gag that was on the show.

If 2007 is considered “several” then you might be correct. Unless you know the actual date that this prank is made. However there are several differences between the freeze which improveverywhere made popular and the one in the link you provided. Which is probably how long the freeze is for, and that the freeze in the video you provided is repeated several times with several different unsuspecting customers. The main concept, I assume, is to surprise a few people, not as many as improveverywhere has. But the only thing different is both wasn’t marketed, however R.E.M. is, there lies the problem, I’m totally guessing that one.

Theres one link to the same gag done on a smaller scale from several years ago.

But hey,I’m sure they just hopped in a time machine to the future,seen what a great idea you had and stole it from you.Those ungrateful bastards.

You all made the idea more well known by doing it on a larger scale than anyone I’ve seen before,but don’t talk like you created and own the brilliant concept of not moving.