Speed Racer (partially found Esurance commercial from insurance company; 2008)

Promotional image for Esurance's Speed Racer tie-in.

Status: Partially Found

Among the sponsorship deals arranged for Lana and Lily Wachowski's 2008 film adaptation of Speed Racer was with American online insurance company Esurance. Their tie-in website, which can no longer be found and even less fortunately was not recovered by the Wayback Machine, hosted behind-the-scenes interviews, wallpapers, film clips, renders and sweepstakes, the grand prize winner earning a two-night stay in Los Angeles and a tour of the Warner Bros. Studios.^[1] Despite of this strategy, Speed Racer made around $100 million less than its budget on opening weekend and received lukewarm reception from critics. However, it would receive a gradual cult interest among critics and fans following its release, its style, in particular, being influential to filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

Part of Esurance's tie-in was a TV commercial, directed by Chris Hauge for WildBrain, which saw their controversial animated mascot Erin Esurance driving a pink moped to the film's premiere. This commercial was available on YouTube for a brief period of time, but was removed and supposedly never recovered since. A high-quality copy of the commercial was embedded via Vimeo onto the official website for Halo Pictures, Hauge's production company,^[2] but although the website is still online, all videos featured were unwittingly privatized at one point since 2011 by Hauge, the Speed Racer commercial included, with no means of access. As a result, this is the only known Esurance commercial in the Erin campaign to have not resurfaced as of November 2018. The closest this ad could come to a full resurface was in the form of stills captured by fan David Alan Ward.

The character of Erin was retired in 2010, due to a declining interest and gratuitous association with internet pornography, which took up the majority of online image search results for the character.