2007-sep-07 22:14PST: Reference number 067
That is not a question I can answer. Perhaps you should ask ******.
NOTE: I don't remember the exact timeframe or details, but since it came up, here's what I can remember of it.
This was around or prior to mid-1998. SM was going to, or had already been pulled off the air. I don't remember whose original idea it was, nor was I ever a member of SOS. SOS had a petition to keep SM on the air and after that, proposed the now-infamous 'procot'. To me, it was patent nonsense from the beginning, the rationale never really made sense.
Basically the idea was the reverse of a boycot, that if fans demonstrated their loyalty by buying a certain item advertised on the show, that advertiser would pressure the channel to keep the show on the air. They took some kind of online vote and the item that was chosen was 'strawberry pop tarts'. For those who are unfamiliar with these sugary, processed breakfast-foods go here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-TartsPop tarts had made news about 5 years before when it was found they were among the list of 'combustible breakfast foods' and could literally explode if over-toasted, shooting flames feet in the air. After this, all pop tarts carried a label warning against over-toasting.
SOS made many oddball claims like that for every box of strawberry pop-tarts people bought, SM would stay on the air for 22-point-something minutes longer and therefore if X number of pop tarts needed to be sold. Fans were encouraged to buy multiple boxes, way more than they would ever need, and the buying was to be done on a certain day(?) or week(?) in order that it would be noted by company executives. The plea to buy strawberry pop tarts was posted to many anime MLs and websites to the point where some MLs had to forbid messages like it and ban any offenders. SOS made a bad name for SM fans everywhere and if challanged their answer would be things like 'at least we're doing something'.
The procot came and went with much fanfare in SOS but little elsewhere. In the aftermath, not much happened. SOS posted lots of self-lauding appraisals, vague statements like "my friend in the industry says we definately made a dent". But the sales numbers came and went, SM still got pulled off the air, and after the fact, many people who had supported the idea wondered just what had gotten into their heads.
SOS, however, never really learned their lesson. When Irwin got the latter half of SMR back on the air, in an attempt to sell more of its toy line, SOS claimed the procot had been a great sucess. In reality the two things were completely unrelated, the decision to finish the latter half of SMR was already made by Irwin and in the works long before the day the procot took place.
So every once in a while, SOS would declare a procott on some other item like lunaballs or lunchboxes in hopes that more merchendise would come out, that the show would go back on the air, or something like that. They claimed responsibility for every SM-related sucess and when the procots failed, they blamed the fans for talking them down or not buying enough of the item. If you want to see more the lunacy, just do a search on google for 'pop tart procott'.