The Man in the High Castle: Storyworld Artifacts from Amazon Prime Video
This week I showed my Transmedia Writing students the amazing “Resistance Radio” campaign my friends at Campfire recently launched to promote the Amazon original series The Man in the High Castle (see previous posts)... so when I got home from class that night to find this small, mysterious package from Amazon lying on my doorstep, my heart skipped a beat.
Did I order something from Amazon last week? Wait a minute....
I opened the plain, brown package, revealing another cardboard box inside. Printed on it was a dire warning about “listening to subversive materials,” along with an ominous Third Reich eagle symbol and the date “12-01-62.″ I had entered The Man in the High Castle‘s storyworld—an alternate-history version of 1962, in which America’s been occupied for 17 years by the Nazis and Japanese, after the Axis powers had won World War II.
I’d seen other photos and unboxing videos of this package online, so I already knew what the box contained...but actually holding this rare, meticulously crafted artifact in my hands still made me giddy with excitement nonetheless—especially since the package’s warning made it clear that I was seeing something the Nazis didn’t want me to see.
Inside was a 7″ vinyl record, the sleeve of which identified it (in German and English) as a “Children’s Songbook for Character Building”...once I tipped the record out, though, I saw the “bootleg” recording it actually contained: “The End of the World” by Sharon Van Etten on Side A and “The House of the Rising Sun” by Sam Cohen on Side B—both verboten in this stark world in which rock-n-roll had never been invented. Wow. I instinctively looked over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being watched. All clear.
Also in the package were a needle kit, to make a homemade record player to listen to this subversive material, and what appeared to be a sheet of Nazi propaganda...with fine-print instructions at the bottom that were very familiar to me, thanks to years of reading Mad Magazine as a kid. (I must confess, this was where my “Mint-Condition Collector” side won out over my “Immersed in the Storyworld” side, so I didn’t carve up the record with the enclosed needle or fold a crease in the propaganda sheet. If you want to check these elements out yourself, though, you can listen to Side A here and Side B here, and see the fold-in message here.)
In addition to live performances of these newly reimagined songs by contemporary music stars at South by Southwest this week, this package also pointed the way toward resistanceradio.com, which has several hours of compelling audio content available—18 songs, plus running commentary on the state of the alt-world from Miss Evangeline, Bob Montez, and Jake Rumielin, “pirate DJ” characters that were created for this transmedia extension.
Many thanks to Amazon Prime Video and Campfire for sharing this wonderful treat with me and my students—a masterful example of transmedia storytelling and experience design.
