Review of EepyBird

In November 2005, when Stephen Voltz, a lawyer from Buckfield, Maine discovered a trick that thousands of school children already knew involving mentos and diet coke, little did he know it would land him on the red carpet at the Webbie Awards a little over a year later. Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe (a juggler from Buckfield) took the explosive experiment of combining Diet Coke and Mentos a little further than the average fourth grader. The duo used this volatile reaction to create visually impressive “geysers.” Then, they used the geysers to create a choreographed show worthy of comparison to the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas. After entering a video of their soggy spectacle in various contests to no avail, Voltz and Grobe decided to make their own website in order to showcase their unusual performance. Three days after EepyBird.com (named after a character created by a friend) launched on June 3, 2006, the pair was contacted by producers from the “Late Show with David Letterman” and the rest is history.

Voltz and Grobe have since appeared on NPR, the “Today Show,” the “Late Show with David Letterman,” and featured in the New York Times. EepyBird videos have also appeared on the Blue Man Group’s “How to be a Megastar” tour, the Coca-Cola website, and the Mentos American website. Not too bad for two guys from Buckfield.

Eepybird.com offers a surprising

range of videos considering that the entire premise of the site is exploring the reaction caused by mixing Diet Coke and Mentos. Nevertheless, co-creaters Voltz and Grobe have expanded this simple experiment into several variations of their original performance, as well as taking the sticky stunt on the road to non-Maine locales.

The site displays the EepyBird buddies preparing for a stunt in Washington Square Park in New York (that was later cancelled by the cops), breaking the world record for the most Mentos geysers in Cincinnati, and performing at the Blue Man Group Theater in Boston.

All EepyBird videos are artfully edited to a soundtrack provided by AudioBody. The guys also try to throw some education in with their entertainment by explaining the science behind the explosions in the How Does it Work section. And, realizing that one can only watch soda spout artistically for so long, Voltz and Grobe have also included interesting hunchback how-to’s created by some pals.

Watch Experiment 137 first to see how it all started and then click over to Experiment 214 a.k.a. “The Domino Effect” to see the difference corporate sponsorship makes (ahem…Coca-Cola and Mentos we’re talking about you). To find out how fast a web sensation’s star can rise these days, check out EepyBird’s cameo in a Barenaked Ladies music video.