Website Notes

As far as I can tell, the original www.rainbowrandolph.com website was never set up as a mock website / online storefront. There was a subdomain hosted by Warner Brothers that had a flash / html website under www.smoochymustdie.com which redirected to http://deathtosmoochymovie.warnerbros.com and was on their promotional materials. That main page of the website let you select either Smoochy (on the left) or Rainbow Randolph (on the right). There were two subsections named "welovehim" which tied into the Smoochy and KidNet pages and "mustdie" pages which are posted by Rainbow Randolph. 

• Late 2002 - February 2003, the URL went to an under construction page.

• 2003, the website redirected to a company's site named Network Solutions hosted at a website named "Oingo".

• 2005, there was a landing page stating the domain had expired in February and was pending renewal /deletion.

• 2009, the website had a bunch of spammy looking links with Robin William's name plastered all over a sponsored url/link listing.

• 2013, a landing page was available stating that the domain was available for sale through a company named "BuyDomains", stock images and a couple of phone numbers to call. By the end of 2014, the website brought up a page saying "403 - Forbidden"  and then by 2016 the landing page with the number was put back up. 

• From late 2016 through 2023 the page looks to have gone blank or had been redirected to another domain registrar's landing page. 

• 2021, Private equity group Clearlake Capital completed acquisition of Endurance International Group and Strategic Investment Transactions with Web.com and Affiliates of Siris Capital; Announced Formation of Newfold Digital. BuyDomains is also Domain.com, which is Web.com, which is a company called Newfold Digital, which also lists the following companies in their portfolio: Bluehost, CrazyDomains, HostGator, Network Solutions, Register.com, and Web.com

• 2024, the domain name became available for purchase after a long holding period. It had expired in Feburary 2024 but was unavailable for purchase till about June. It was purchased for renewal by a fan after rewatching the movie. This was done through Squarespace, which had recently taken over domain registrations for Google websites. According to their Wikipedia page and their investor website, Squarespace agreed to be acquired for $6.9 billion and taken private by British private equity firm Permira in May 2024. This page was submitted to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on June 5, 2024. Went ahead and picked up www.smoochymustdie.com since it was available and referenced in the promotional material found online. Planning on having it point back to this site for continuity. Set the font to Comic Sans because the credit sequence did the same. 

After looking at the trailer from the digital press kit, I noticed that www.deathtosmoochymovie.com is active and redirects to https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/death-smoochy. In 2001, www.deathtosmoochymovie.com pointed to a generic WB branded summary page from about November 2001 till at latest April 2002 then it pointed to the old flash/html site, then in/around mid 2011 it pointed to a "WB Shop"page, till mid 2018 where it currently points to https://www.warnerbros.com/death-smoochy 

It looks like Warner Brothers may go through a company called www.markmonitor.com to maintain registration of www.deathtosmoochymovie.com which was updated in 2022 but created in 2000 and currently expires/auto-renews towards the end of 2024. Here's an early draft of the script with a date of December 2000 so this timeframe lines up pretty well. Markmonitor's site states that they are an ICANN-Accredited Domain Registrar. According to their Wikipedia page, Markmonitor was eventually under the umbrella of Reuters, sold to two venture capital companies, under the new parent company Clarivate Analytics. In 2022, Clarivate announced that Newfold Digital purchased its subsidiary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markmonitor 

Phone Number Notes

If you don't remember what letters match up to the numbers on a phone, this word to phone number converter on MiniWebTool works great: https://miniwebtool.com/word-to-phone-number-converter 

1-800-RAINBOW = 1-800-724-6269

As of June 2024, the phone number listed in the movie's intro looks to be owned by a company that sells backyard wooden playsets & swing sets: https://www.rainbowplay.com 

There is also a website that sells air purifiers lists the same 800 number as their customer support - so that's confusing to me, but I haven't looked into it: https://rainbowecuador.com 

There is a mention of a Rainbow International which may have owned the number at one point. Am guessing there may be a verbose historical registry related to toll free / 800 numbers and who owned them but not sure at the moment. For now, using this site shows a working history of the number along with the name of the current owner as Lumen Technologies, but I'm not sure how up to date that information is since that 800 number is also listed on a couple of live websites at the moment: https://www.800forall.com/SearchWhoOwns.aspx