The annual Burning Man festival in the temporary Black Rock City in Nevada has turned over the course of its almost three decades running into the staple of creativity and art experimentation, something that has caused it to get mocked on more than one occasion - including the Burning Man Quiznos spoof.
The Denver-based submarine fast food giant recently launched a spoof ad about its artistic culture and how it's supposedly sold out (only a few days back, Forbes' top-earning artist Katy Perry was reported to be in the event, which would stand against its anti-capitalist principles), and the people behind the festival are not having any Burning Man Quiznos mockery.
According to The Verge, the Burning Man Quiznos feud began when the fast food chain released an ad parodying the festival's "strange, strange world," featuring a group of millennials becoming Burners, in the style of the 2014 film "The Maze Runners" - and the spoof was released barely after the iconic festival ended for 2015.
As The Washington Post reports, the Burning Man Quiznos spoof, modeled after a film trailer, sees a group of young people coming into the festival for the first time and realizing what it's turned into, with one of them commenting that he'd just seen "a Google exec fire-jousting with P. Diddy."
In all, the non-profit organization behind the festival, the Burning Man Project, didn't take things all to well and one of its reps spoke to local Reno Gazette-Journal, saying that the Burning Man Quiznos ad would be met with some form of confrontation, as they are currently checking with their legal team to see "what action we can take."
"We are pretty proactive about protecting our 10 principles, one of which is decommodification," said Jim Graham, the rep from Burning Man. "We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down."
Watch the ad that could end up in Burning Man and Quiznos going into court!