Marrying a viral video and Bend tourism already proved to be a mistake once. Bend officials have been wise to step away.

Scott Elnes, a local producer, is working on creating a funny, hip-hop spoof promoting Central Oregon. He is raising money and got a letter of support from Nate LiaBratten, the Bend manager for Economic Development for Central Oregon. LiaBratten now says EDCO can’t endorse the idea without seeing it first.

Good idea.

The lyrics and music Elnes has come up with are clever and catchy. But what will the images be? That’s a big question.

The video that inspired Elnes made its mark, in part, by injecting images into a tourism video of people ripping off clothes and lightly-clad dancers prancing around. That video promoting Leavenworth, Wash., went viral. It has some 500,000 hits on YouTube.

Elnes said he isn’t going so much for shock as hilarity. That reminded us of the last time people tried to promote Bend with hilarity in a hoped-to-be-viral video.

Just a few years ago, in 2006, what is now called Visit Bend spent $35,000 on a cartoon marketing campaign for the city.

The campaign collapsed nearly as soon as it began. The video was funny, colorful and tasteless.

It said Bend was the kind of place where people drink like fishes and stagger from bar to bar, showing a fish blacking-out and falling out of his chair. It said Bend was a place you could date your sister and had a snowboarder popping open the door to his van and singing as a cloud of smoke pours out. Maybe suggestions of drunkeness, incest and drug use can be funny in a joke. It’s not an image Bend should project.

The video was pulled. (We found a copy of it at www.utterlyboring.com/archives/videos/bendOregon_OR_FINAL.swf.)

The city of Bend and EDCO now both say they come not to prejudge Elnes’ project but to praise the idea of finding new ways to promote the area creatively. That’s the perfect public relationsy kind of thing to say.

We’ll add something else: No public money for this private promotion.