Ranting about Screen Rant again
Here I was looking for more info about that Abrams-Powell-Ortega vehicle when this shit came up ofc
J.J. Abrams's big break didn't come with Lost, it came from ALIAS, with Jennifer Garner (and Victor Garber). It gave Bradley Cooper his first big job, too.
To "forget" something like this is insane, given how rabid the "normie" fanbase was in their utterly thrilling weekly spy mystery in which we could all participate in. (More on that in a sec.) We needed something like this, because it hadn't even been 20 days since September 11th that the show premiered.
And we looooooved Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow. LOVED HER. I have the Sydney Bristow Blue Suit (iykyk) Funko in my closet (LOL).
That was her star rising, but then she got trapped by Ben after Daredevil and the rest is fun but hokey family fare history with 13 Going on Thirty and Yes Day with the Mogwai.
I was obsessed with ALIAS and had two websites for weekly recap and screencaps (and back then this was difficult...downloading one episode of ALIAS took more than 24 hours on AOL dial-up internet...now it takes about 3 or so minutes for HD copies). I liked making pretty and functional websites relevant to the shows I stanned, and I legit stanned this show at the time online.
yAnd J.J. Abrams was going to make use of the new web as it was back then, because he included/directed a web puzzle for the fans to busy themselves with. I was one of those fans who loved this kind of multimedia interaction, so I dove in without hesitation (it brought interactive connectivity to fans and shows before social media)
This info is 23 years old but I can attest to its veracity, particularly this part:
Both. It was both, because I hate sanctimonious and self-righteous dicks, and some of the top players in that Yahoo Group were such dicks. Ultimately there was anything massive to be gained in this game, aside from the clues relative to the storyline and the next episode. But there was popular one dude/player who was particularly obnoxious about the game, so I decided to fuck with him and in turn, fuck with the rest of the idiots around him. It was specific beef, but it's 23-year-old insignificant beef that is now an amusing memory of how I created a handful of websites, masked their identities, created "false" clues about the storyline, and then conversed with a few of them on AIM to drop the clue and send their brains into a wild goose chase.
Except the chase wasn't so wild.
Underneath the big SD6🇺🇸 v K-Directorate🇷🇺 race for the Ripoff Da Vinci's artifacts, the big mystery plaguing Sydney at the time was what happened to her mother, so in my romantic fandom brain I surmised that Sydney's mother was probably Russian K-Directorate (isn't that always the case), which lent to Jack Bristow's complex detachment to his serious attachments. I Photoshopped photos of Victor Garber/photoshopped what looked to be like his old passport photo tacked onto a note in Russian (among other photoshops; I was operating under K-Directorate, so everything was Russian) and stegged other photos with the clue to make it all the more believable and they ate it up until the next few episodes where I suddenly stopped giving them fake clues out of simply moving on (the damage was done LOL I had them watching their AOL AIMs like nerdy little wannabe spycrafters 🤣 HI... IT'S ME...I WAS THE PROBLEM).
But even to that day of the game's knowledge on Avery's site, they still couldn't confirm that the clues were indeed fake because my clues about Sydney's mother were vague. Very vague (including the AIM messages I responded with). And it all worked out in the end, even if there was a quiet dismissal of what I did because they realize that they'd realized that they'd been trolled/misled.
I was a literal Russian troll. 💀
Anyway, thank you, Screen Rant...for this latest opportunity to ramble that left my hand hurting again. I still have other drafts to finish. 🥲
TLDR: J.J. Abrams's (Jennifer Garner, and Bradley Cooper's big break) was ALIAS, not Lost.
