Gore Verbinski's Rango remains a bit of a mystery. Even after an announcement piece came out earlier this month, audiences were perplexed why a movie about a chameleon suffering from an identity crisis would be advertised with a giant toy fish. Even stranger, the film sports a cast that includes Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy, Ray Winstone, and Timothy Olyphant, and not a single character was revealed. The newest update to the film's website doesn't give us much information as to who the characters are, but at least we get to see them.
When the site first launched alongside the announcement piece it featured a long strip of desert, and not much more. Now there are all kinds of interactive goodies, three of which reveal some characters from the film:
- The guitar - Scrolling over the guitar produces a strum, but if you wave your mouse over the strings long enough, an owl wearing a mariachi hat shows up on screen to play a little diddy on his electric guitar.
- The toad - On the right side of the first screen you can see what, at first glance, appears to be a gray lump. Clicking on the lump, however, reveals that it is actually a giant cane toad who is trying to catch some z's. Clicking on him multiple times will result in different reactions, all of which have the same general message: go away.
- The pillbug/gophers - After clicking on the toad, move your mouse slowly down and to the right - this should reveal a second page. Click on what appears to be a ball (and is actually a pillbug) and it will roll into a nearby gopher hole. If you do this enough times, a pair of gophers will emerge and will say something about a bank and making a wrong turn. It seems that these two little rodents are trying to pull off a heist.
Unfortunately, I can't pick out any of the individual voices, but perhaps you can. The rest of the site is full of goodies that don't produce characters, such as a radio that plays soft country music and a plastic palm tree that you can use to chuck rocks at cars, but are fun to mess with nonetheless. Check it out over at RangoMovie.com.
