Fans of ABC’s “Lost” have been, well, lost since the addictive drama about 48 plane-crash survivors on a maddeningly mysterious island aired the final episode of its first season in late May.
But TiVo clutchers who scour episodes for embedded clues found a live one in a fleeting shot of a poster for the fictional Oceanic Air.
Slickly designed and realistic enough to mimic the unplugged Web site of a now-defunct air carrier, www.oceanic-air.com was developed with the show’s creators and writers, says Mike Benson, ABC senior vice president of marketing. “With this show, everything happens for a reason, and it’s the same with the Web site.”
Which is why Internet fan boards are buzzing with deconstructions of the site’s hatch-like mystery items: an interactive seating chart that pops up when the show’s mystical numbers – 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 – are plugged into some empty fields. And a pink script page with a scene revealing the island’s elusive monster, with the hand-lettered admonition: “No! No! No!! No mapinguari! NOT YET!”
According to the lore of Brazil’s Amazon jungle, a mapinguari is a sloth-like creature with a terrible smell, slashing claws and an aggressive disinclination for being disturbed, even by highly rated network shows.
As for Benson, he won’t elaborate on the significance of mythological South American beasts on this infuriatingly tight-lipped island, where the second season resumes in late September.
But he promises all the keyboarding won’t be for naught. “The last thing I want to do,” he said with the portentous vagueness that has become the show’s hallmark, “is put something out there that doesn’t tie into the program.”
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