These Are Some of Pop Culture's Most Spectacular Screw-Ups

There are two wolves inside us all: one who’s fairly competent, another who’s terrible at absolutely everything.

Living a successful life is all about keeping that first wolf content – tickling his tummy, scratching his ear, feeding him large slabs of elk. Unfortunately, doing so requires effort and concentration, two things most of us don’t much time for. And so, at various points in our lives, we submit to wolf number two and screw it all up.

That screw-up might be manageable, like arriving late to a meeting or contracting a preventable STD. Or it might be large, like taking so much acid you never stop tripping, or gradually bankrupting a multinational media company. The point is: we all mess up now and again, some of us a little more spectacularly than others. 

This week on VICE.com is “Oops Week” – a celebration of some of history’s finest disasters – and we’re kicking things off with this, the inaugural Oops Awards, to commend the people, companies and products who have truly excelled at fucking it all up.

Juicero, for the uninitiated, was founded by Doug Evans, a man who once compared himself to Steve Jobs. Doug may not have revolutionized the way humans communicate, but he did start a company that sold plastic sachets of fruit, plus a $400 machine that squeezed the juice out of that fruit. 

Doug’s downfall began when people realized their hands did a better job of squeezing out that juice than the machine. To save face, Juicero told consumers that their juicers could connect to the internet, and were therefore able to alert them to expired fruit packets. Unfortunately, they had already printed expiration dates on all of those fruit packets.

Honorary mention: Not exactly a start-up, considering it’s a product created by Earth’s largest spy agency, but Google Glass also deserves a mention in this category for being such a gigantic failure.

There are surely few things more excruciating than realising you’ve accidentally broadcasted yourself masturbating – that most sacred, shameful of acts – to literally anyone at all, let alone a Zoom call full of your colleagues. Break every one of my bones, curl me into a ball and punt me directly into the sun. 

Writing about this feels like being forced to recount one of the most traumatic moments of your childhood, but here goes: sometime in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook would be dominated by video, forcing publishers (guilty as charged) to furiously staff up departments in anticipation of losing traffic.

After the “pivot to video” failed to pay off in any meaningful way, a court filing alleged that, actually, Facebook had inflated audience metrics for video and nobody was going to make any money from it, leading to widespread layoffs across the industry. Ha ha ha ha! What a hilarious prank, Zuck!! You tricksy little elf, you!!! 

Actually quite hard to think about this without involuntarily clenching my entire body into instant sciatica, but remember when Kelly Osbourne tried to slam a presidential candidate on The View and made her point so, so, incredibly badly? 

Let me remind you: “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump? You know what I mean?”

Aaah! AAAAAAHHHH!!!!

Ponder all the shits you’ve looped around a toilet bowl. None of these shits will compare to the one that forced a British Airways flight to turn back on itself, half an hour after embarking on a seven-hour trip, leaving passengers stranded for over 15 hours. 

In a statement, BA said: “A decision was taken to return for the safety and comfort of our customers on board. We’re very sorry for the discomfort to our customers. We provided them with hotel accommodation and rescheduled the flight to depart the next day.” This is why God or The Academy or whoever created awards, so that the person who ruined a plane-load of people’s holiday could be crowned the most ruinous shitter on the planet.

Unfortunately, that person has remained anonymous since the incident in 2015. My friend, come forward. Don’t be scared. We salute you.

Launching yourself from one platform to another is a feat that in all honestly should probably only be attempted by supreme beings of supernatural talent and ability. And I’m not saying Miguel isn’t that!!! But he didn’t exactly prove his aptitude for “leaping” at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards, when instead of slickly hopping over the crowd below, he stacked it and inadvertently fly-kicked two women in the head. They just don’t do live television moments like that anymore.

Wonderland Eurasia was a sprawling amusement park in Ankara, opened in March of 2019 and closed in February, 2020. It had 17 roller coasters (the joint-third most worldwide) and was absolutely full of fibreglass dinosaur models. There were colossal ones woven into the fabric of roller coasters, dinosaur skeletons, and smaller T-rex egg hatchlings – and famously, what consumers want is to pay a premium to look at plastic dinosaur infants.

Alas, the project closed due to low visitor numbers, having cost $801 million to build. This resulted in some wildly depressing photos – all decapitated diplodocuses and decaying teapots. When some YouTube lads broke in last year, they found food abandoned and rotting in the fridges. Apocalyptic extinction chic!

The Texan Republican, who previously argued that banning sex toy sales would protect “public morals”, briefly liked a Twitter video of MILF porn from an account memorably called @SexuallPosts. (He said it was someone else using his account, and done on accident.)

Obviously this is a happy mistake, because La La Land is basically Old Jazz Man Yells at Cloud (or, as I like to put it: Rent, but make it reactionary!) and Moonlight is actually a Real Film for Real Cinema Heads, but the run-up to the latter getting the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 will never not make me want to die from the kind of face-on-fire embarrassment better associated with dreams where you appear naked in front of your entire high school. 

No fewer than three La La Land producers had to clarify in front of a live audience that, yes, the wrong result card was read, and yes, Moonlight was actually Best Picture. And then! One of them actually held up the card that said “MOONLIGHT” to underscore the fact we were witnessing one of the biggest Oscar mistakes of all time. To cap it off, the camera zoomed in on the card, like a scene from Arrested Development where Gob fucks up one of his bargain bin magic tricks.

Imagine being the underpaid and overworked runner who hand-delivered this steaming hot cup of java to an actor (originally thought to be Emilia Clarke, now established to be Conleth Hill, who plays Lord Varys) who’s paid more per day than you’ll see in a month. Imagine finding out that the rogue cardboard cup made it into the final edit, only after the roughly $15 million episode aired. Imagine the cold sweat as you scroll through your timeline, every meme making your anxiety skyrocket faster than an HBO exec’s blood pressure. Imagine the emails, the recriminations. Imagine having a full-blown PTSD response the next time you see a Starbucks takeaway cup.

Sorry for another poo one, but this has to be in here. It’s about the ultimate unthinkable, the stuff of your deepest, darkest nightmares – a poo not flushing at someone you fancy’s house.

Two people went on a Tinder date, then went back to the guy’s house, where the unnamed woman took a shit that jammed up the toilet. In response, the shitter scooped out her business from the bowl and threw it out the bathroom window in a blind panic, only for it to get wedged between two non-opening windows. After climbing in after it – head first – she got wedged too, and her date had to call the fire brigade.

The current status of their relationship is unknown.

He really didn’t help himself, did he. In the midst of his “Boyfriend” era, while desperately trying to pivot from snotty child star to grown-up heartthrob, he publicly admitted to drinking “too much” of the baby juice.

The college football star widely claimed to be mourning a girlfriend who never existed, bringing the concept of “catfishing” to the 2010s mainstream. As the Deadspin blog famously exposed, Te’o was as much a victim of a hoax as the sports media who fact-checked the story even less than he did.

An iconic meme, rightfully included in every single one of those “British humour compilation” videos, along with “WHY DOES NONE OF YAS KNOW HOW TAE FLUSH A TOILET WHEN YUV HAD A SHET”. 

For the Americans (and everybody else): this moment saw Jesy Nelson of pop group Little Mix attempt a Jamaican accent, only to make a noise that is so hard to describe I’m not even sure how to google it. Barendeh? Balegdah? Bahyende? So many questions! Has she ever heard a Jamaican person speak? What did she say? Who thought the “Little Mix Accent Challenge” was a good idea?

Jesy has subsequently explained that it was in fact not her attempt at a Jamaican accent, but more of a thought clearing exercise before giving her response. “We have this thing, when we can’t think of what to say, we’ll say that,” she told Jonathan Ross.

After the NBA star’s wife got into an argument on Twitter with provocateur Kat Stacks, Carmelo Anthony offered $5,000 to “slap the shit out her pigeon face ass” – then deleted the tweet, claimed he was hacked, and thanked Twitter for restoring his account. Good stuff.

Honorary mention: When Rita Ora’s account tweeted, “Dropping my new song Monday if this get 100,000 retweets” – a tweet that got 2,000 retweets before it was deleted and Rita claimed that somebody “threatening to release new music” had hacked her :(