THE WEIRD AND THE BOOTLEG

With multimillion-dollar franchises, it's only a matter of time until something unofficial pops up to cash in on the brand. Unlike fan works, which are made with a genuine love for the series, bootleg stuff is soulless and made as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Back in the day, bootleg merchandise was the name of the game, and still is with massively popular things such as The Simpsons and Sonic the Hedgehog. NATM didn't exactly get a merch line to make bootlegs of, but in the age of content farms everything is up for grabs. This page seeks to catalogue the weird content farm stuff that plagues YouTube Kids, unofficial and unlicensed uses of the characters and branding, and other weird places you wouldn't expect to see them pop up. Like sermons!

For stuff made by fans who genuinely care about the series, check out the Fan Works or Fan Merchandise pages.

For references made in your favorite shows and movies, check out the References page.

Clothing

Larry Daley Jacket

Source: Ultimate Leather

Availability: Likely Fake

For £75, you can buy this pretty awesome looking Larry replica jacket. It doesn't have any seals of authenticity, so it seems to be a bootleg. A pretty high quality one, though, surprisingly so.

Unfortunately, images are pulled from who knows where, and Ultimate Leather UK's reviews show a history of scamming people with low quality products.

NATM Knockoff Yeezys

Source: IEBAcademy

Availability: Likely Fake

In 2024, these shoes made the rounds on Pinterest and Tumblr. They are manufactured by IEBAcademy, a Pinterest automatic program shop, whose site is so rudimentary the dropdown lists are filled with Lorem Ipsum. These are likely screen-printed, and cheaply made. Still, could you imagine wearing these? You'd have to beat the ladies off with a stick.

Organizations

Housatonic Museum of Art

Bootleg Media: Promotional Images (Dexter Promo PNG)

In 2018, the Housatonic Museum of Art hosted a NATM-themed fundraiser. This article from Patch proves its existence.

Content warning: the poster in the article is uncensored and uses an anti-Rromani slur.

Advocare

Bootleg Media: Series Logo

In 2019, the multi-level marketing operation Advocare was convicted of being a pyramid scheme. Before its conviction, it held a President's Party in 2012 in Fort Worth, TX, themed around NATM.

Advocare still operates today, selling unregulated supplements like any good pyramid scheme. After being forced to change their business model, it is unknown if they are still participating as a pyramid scheme, or as a pyramid scheme with extra steps.

Sermons

So, more than once, preachers at Christian churches have used the NATM brand to proselytize. Really. The ones we've found are listed here. We've also got a growing amount of Christian interaction with the franchise as a whole: mostly review sites, but occasionally we'll find devotionals, VBS content, and other similar shit.

Night at the Creation Museum: Yes, this is real. A film made to promote creationism. It's just too funny not to include. There's also a sequel, "Night at the Ark Encounter", but we haven't been able to find it.
Kevin Kringel's 2019 Sermon: A NatM-themed sermon by a televangelist. There's two more of these, but they're audio only. Here's part two and part three.
Oasis Ministries' 2011 Sermon: A now defunct ministry made a NatM themed sermon. That's about it. The Vimeo upload seems to have been deleted. If you saved this video, send it to us!
Willis Wired: A devotional written for church youth groups by Joleen Willis, written in early 2007 just after the first film's release.
Kidology: A "kid-appropriate" Christian review site for media. Pretty tame, all things considered, until you get to the bit about "promoting evolution".
ChristianAnswers.net: Yet another review site, this one weirdly enough mentioning how "risqué" Shepseheret looks. More of the same: acting weird about other religions existing, bitching about evolution, et cetera, et cetera... Until you get to the comments, in the Negative section. Everyone's bitching about how gay Octavius acts. Now THAT'S the Christianity I know!

Content Farms

Content farms are media creation and distribution companies that create large volumes of stuff ranging from articles to videos, often with no regard for quality control. In journalism, this can lead to plagiarism and the spread of misinformation. On YouTube, it leads to using characters and plots from kids media in strange ways.

Created by Dolly and Friends: Short Story

Created by Serie's Kingdom