Oreo video with a Portlandia flavor racks up YouTube views
PORTLAND, Ore. - Sure, it's a promotional bit for a cookie. But it has got Portland written all over it.
A video on Oreo's YouTube channel (and also prominently featured on Oreo's website) showing a Portland man's complicated contraption for removing the white creme out of an Oreo cookie is racking up the views.
As of Wednesday, the count had passed 250,000 views on YouTube.
How much of the video is real and how much is the creation of a certain local and well-known advertising agency is a bit fuzzy, but the fact of the matter is the Rube Goldberg machine in the video actually works, as witnessed at about the 3:25 mark in the video.
The man who made the machine, David Neevel, is a Wieden+Kennedy employee. (We tried to talk to him on Wednesday but the folks at Oreo wouldn't make him available.)
The video is shot in Portland (a TriMet bus goes rolling by in one shot) and the Mad Dog Garage referenced is an actual business owned by local artist David Butts, according to his website.
The video certainly has the feel of a particular popular TV show about Portland, complete with Oreo separator inventor Neevel complaining about the cold, the lack of good local sandwiches and putting "about .4 years - wait, .04 years" into the project, which he complains took him away from his "girlfriend and my dog for hours at a time."
Neevel says he is a "physicist and copywriter" and hates the creme in Oreo cookies, thus the creation of the complicated machinery to remove it and leave him with his favorite part - the cookies. He even takes a blowtorch to an Oreo at one point.
Of course, the video has a few critical product placement shots of Oreo cookies, along with overly dramatic music and cinematic camera work.
Meghan Kalkstein will have more on this important story tonight on KATU News at 5 and 6 p.m.
Portlandia is a documentary.
Someone obviously has too much time on his hands. Why take a perfectly good Oreo cookie apart; isn't that adulterating or tampering with a product if he sells them? Maybe someone will invent a machine to take the air out of a tire?  Â
@jpkÂ
I have that machine (to take air out of tires).Â
Some call it a knife!
LOL
@Repoman @jpk Nice machine you have there, Repoman.
Anything identified as even remotely identified with "Portlandia" is definitely suspect!
Oreo should just sell this guy the plain cookies, then put all the creme that would have gone in them in a jar and send it to me. For free.
sweet! RT @KATUNews: The crazy #Oreo video shot in Portland: Real? Fake? Both? Here's the creme between the cookies: http://t.co/FQCZiCZXDB
Yep keep Portland weird. Â This is funny
Awesume! Lol!
This is so silly and hilarious, I don't care if it is an ad, it's pretty clever.
Thats awesome
Finally something worth putting in the news KATU!!!
@LauraAllisonMac @KATUMeghan Removing the creme should be a criminal offense. Unless you are making Triple Double Stufs.
lol i love this town and the peolpe in it :)
I would skin him alive if I caught that boy picking the walnuts out of my Chocolate Chip Cookies....and he better shave that cookie duster before he tracks mud all over my front porch.
Psycho
Why are there 3 posts directed a John Canzano here?
@Oregon7812Â I think those are done from twitter.. See the little blue birdie in the upper corner..Â
lol..I wish I had a job doing other stuff besides what I'm supposed to be doing....oh wait....
I only like the white center. Â I suppose with today's mind set, Â that makes me racist. Â Jesse Jackson will probably be knocking on my door anytime.
â@JohnCanzanoBFT: The scoop on the @Oreo machine: http://t.co/JGAQ1mdbteâ. Only in PDX....
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes...you are a nut.
@xilef regnu sometimes you wish you could be the nut
@Pvpbw @xilef regnuÂ
An annn ann ann ann, beee the nut, beee the nut.Â
Hilarious