Come game day, the crew passed out the light-up necklaces to gamegoers, who were instructed to put them on during halftime so as to spell out PRINCE.
Things get a little hazy from there. The rainy conditions ended up obscuring the message, Hargrave says, which was actually ZUG.COM. After footage of the stunt and a write-up were posted to that site, some critics called bullshit, saying it was all made up after the fact to dupe the media.
Hargrave is okay with that. After all, duping is what he does best. "It's not that I have a problem with authority," he wrote in his 2007 book Prank the Monkey, "it's that I have a problem with senseless authority."
In fact, the only thing Hargrave seems to have contempt for more than senseless authority is a crappy prank. He loathes, for example, Ashton Kutcher–style shenanigans, which he thinks "lowers the art form."
"Kutcher's idea of a clever prank is to find the car of an obscure rap star, run it over with a monster truck, then watch his reaction," declares Hargrave in Prank the Monkey. A truly inspired prank, he believes, is one that is tailor-made for its target and makes some kind of larger point.
With Walmart, Hargrave honed in on that store's penchant for censorship. Forging the store's barcode using Photoshop, he attached fake tags to a box full of items the megachain refused to sell at the time — a George Carlin book, a Sheryl Crow CD, etc. — and brought them to his local branch. Once inside, he began peppering his items throughout. The shining moment came later when he actually got a counterwoman to sell him his own planted copy of the porn mag Big Black Butts.
"As humans we're very locked into our reality and how we think the world is," says Hargrave. "What we do is show people how to disrupt that reality. We cause a break in that by doing something that's funny and unexpected and unusual.
"Hopefully it makes everybody laugh at the end of the day. And if it doesn't, if they're the victim of a prank, hopefully at least it makes everybody else laugh."
Ian Sands can be reached at isands@thephoenix.com.
