The big day came on December 20th, and when the clock struck midnight, The Meteor was released to the world in all its glory. Within two hours, there were dozens of unique visitors to the Meteor page, and it remained a somewhat popular feature for months afterwards. The Meteor never generated a huge amount of praise, but on occasion I still get an email telling me how funny they thought the Director's Commentary was. To this day, I catch other sites linking to The Meteor, and my statistics still show a steady amount of traffic branching from the Meteor page to other sections of the website - so as far as bringing me people goes, it's still doing its job.

As far as to why it wasnt a larger hit, I offer this explanation. Part of the humor in The Meteor was it's over-the-top promotion for something that really wasn't such a big deal. It was clear that I went waaaay out of my way to hype this thing, and people were convinced that for so much effort to go into backing a movie, it must have some redeeming qualities. Not that The Meteor didn't have that. It was, after all, a noble attempt at filmmaking when i was a 13-year-old kid still in middle school. But there was no chance of it ever living up to its months of coordinated smoke-and-mirrors set up to make The Meteor seem potentially phenomenal. But it was still an experiment in advertising, and a successful one at that. I was able to take something as simple as a digitized version of a 5-minute movie I made as a little kid on a zero dollar budget, and market it as something it wasn't - a big hit. People believed in the promotional events and tuned in to see what all the hype was about, and those that never bought into the idea that I would set up a booth promoting a holiday horror movie at a local middle school still tuned in because the feature itself was still created in that same weird vein of humor it was promoted with. Perhaps there was some expectation violation with those that weren't in on the joke, but if they enjoyed the feeling leading up to it, then maybe it was still worthwhile.

I even had several requests to make real versions of the promotional t-shirt.