In fact, the company's licensing business actually got its major kickoff from a group of Lucasfilm employees that really wanted to see the Star Wars Tauntaun sleeping bag, an April Fools' gag from 2009, made into a real product for purchase. They're responsible for establishing and solidifying the company's treasure trove of licenses and line of branded products. Somewhat counterintuitively, these one-day-a-year, well-meaning infractions helped ThinkGeek's licensing business go legit. By that I mean they've never quite been sued for infringing upon a license. ThinkGeek's never incurred the full wrath of corporate lawyerdom for its whimsical April Fools' creations. creative liberties with the licenses because it's going to be fun." "We feel that for April Fools' we can take a little bit of. But it's all good-natured, as Ty Liotta, VP of the company's in-house product development group, or Geeklabs, pointed out to me. Happily though, that cease and desist ended amicably and generated plenty of publicity for both ThinkGeek and the National Pork Board. There was that one incident where the National Pork Board took issue with ThinkGeek labeling its Unicorn Meat as the new white meat - an obvious play on the other white meat. Those well-meaning jokes also tend to straddle a legal gray area with established licenses and corporate entities. There was that one incident where the National Pork Board took issue with ThinkGeek labeling its Unicorn Meat as the new white meat Beard, a repurposed Keurig that administers spray-on facial hair, or the Flux Capacitor Car Charger. Months in advance, the gleefully mad elves (or Oompa-Loompas, I couldn't decide) of ThinkGeek toil exhaustively to create joke products, often the stuff of fanboy/girl dreams, for "sale" on its retail site things like Mr. The company, which normally sells meme-, sci-fi- and geek culture-infused novelty products, like its Star Wars lightsaber chopsticks, does something somewhat different for that one prank-filled day of the year. I'd made the trek from New York to the DC area to get an inside look at ThinkGeek's long-standing April Fools' Day tradition.
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