Winnebago Man Review
By David Kempler
Viral Video Run Amok
You know how your email Inbox often gets cluttered with endless reams of nonsense, bad jokes, boring photos of your friends doing nothing, slide presentations of cats being cutesy-wutesy, chain letters promising you a slow and certain death unless you pass the email along, and Facebook postings that tell you that some guy you met three summers ago just enjoyed a burger at some hole-in-the-wall in some small town in Idaho? One of the few things that does come along from time-to-time, that is worth a laugh, is a truly funny video. The problem is that for every funny one there are 25 unfunny ones.
One of the greatest videos to ever flash onto my computer screen involved a series of outtakes from a gentleman doing television commercials for Winnebagos. I admit that I watched it many times, often marveling at the torture the fellow was experiencing. He kept blowing his lines and cursing, screaming about how hot it was, wailing about flies being everywhere, and just being clearly miserable at his task.
Ben Steinbauer couldn't leave well enough alone. Instead of allowing it to just be a great viral video, he wanted to know the man behind the man, and he thought we all should know him, too. So he set out on a quest to film him and get the lowdown on what went on during the shooting of the ad, and to find out who he really was. Big mistake.
The mystery man is Jack Rebney and, before he became a YouTube phenomenon, people were actually circulating videotapes of his hilarious outbursts. He was an underground cult hero. Steinbauer tracked him down in a small cabin in a remote forest in Northern California. Oddly, Rebney was totally unaware that he was a megastar of viral video and at first was not in the least bit interested in chatting about it, preferring to vent his political beliefs in front of the camera.
The first fifteen minutes of "Winnebago Man" are brilliant, because it focuses on all of the videos he made as a salesman. But after a while, you come to realize that there isn't much else here of entertainment value. The funny videos repeat until even they lose their luster.
In our Internet-driven society, perhaps snippets are the most worthwhile things we have. By trying to make this into a full-length film, Steinbauer robs a lot of the fun from the total experience. It's not a badly made picture or entirely boring, but the videos of the anonymous Winnebago salesman is the show, and you can see the show - if you haven't already - by just looking for it online. Do that, and save yourself the price of admission of Steinbauer's well-intentioned but overdone project.
