It's no secret that Burning Man, everyone's favorite post-apocalyptic bougie-hippie unwashed-techie drug- and hug-athon, is the butt of quite a few jokes, despite its ever-growing popularity. (Need we remind you that Katy Perry was there on a Segway …)Anyways, the festival has achieved such heights of mainstream curiosity and criticism that it may even have to protect its public image the old-school way: with lawsuits. In a recent instance of true weirdness, Burning Man may be going head-to-legal-head with none other than the toasted sandwich chain Quizno's.At the center of the controversy is a tongue-in-cheek trailer recently released by Quizno's for a parody film called The Burn Trials: Out of the Maze and Into the Playa. Part of the company's Toasty.tv promotional series, this video follows the company's sendups of The Maze Runner, Mad Men, and Straight Outta Compton (retitled as Straight Outta the Toaster).In The Burn Trials, a group of wide-eyed Millennials—hot off the heels of Coachella—travels to Burning Man, only to find it perniciously infected by sub rosa corporate influence. The group discovers that rather than a genuine embodiment of anti-establishment values and personal expression, the event has become an opportunistic Instagram circle jerk and a "place for rich people to check off their bucket lists."But the organizers of the free-spirited festival aren't too happy with anyone pointing out that Burning Man might not be the anarchist utopia it purports to be. According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham claims that the video constitutes theft of the event's intellectual property."We are pretty proactive about protecting our ten principles, one of which is decommodification," Graham told the paper. "We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down."Quizno's and Burning Man were not in contact before the video was posted online.Graham told the Gazette-Journal that event organizers routinely beats down attempts by corporations to pair their products with the Burning Man festival. In one notable case, Burning Man successfully sued Girls Gone Wild filmmakers.As for Quizno's, maybe they thought that they were just poking lighthearted fun at a ubiquitous talk point in contemporary culture. But maybe they didn't expect Burning Man, which they put on blast for its mixed principles of anarchist partying and corporate swaggery, to fight back using the book. Who knew that all those smiley, furry, effigy-burning desert bicyclists wouldn't be able to laugh at themselves?Then again, maybe they should have seen it coming.
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