Rumored Reagan Hologram is (Apparently) Real

  • Share
  • Read Later
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Quick: What do Ronald Reagan and Tupac Shakur have in common?


According to a report by Yahoo News,  seemingly far-fetched rumors circulating of a planned Ronald Reagan hologram at the Republican National Convention are, in fact, genuine. Initial reports suggested the 40th President of the United States would appear immediately before Florida Senator Marco Rubio as a “to be announced” speaker.

Of course, the surprise speaker was ultimately revealed to be Clint Eastwood, whose now infamous rant at an imaginary President Obama in a chair has given rise to the new internet meme #Eastwooding.

The rumors were declared untrue by John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain, the company that helped bring Tupac Shakur back from the dead for an appearance at this spring’s Coachella festival. The Atlantic blamed the story, which was picked up by Fox News, on a satirical piece in the Bennington Vale Evening Transcript. Textor told the Wall Street Journal: “I would enjoy seeing holograms in political discourse. But that rumor isn’t true.”

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

In yet in another twist saga,  it now appears that a Reagan hologram was actually actually set to appear, albeit not at the convention itself. Tony Reynolds, the founder of crowdsourcing website A KickIn Crowd,  told Yahoo News that he’d been working on a hologram that would appear at the Lakeland Center, an auditorium in Lakeland, Fla. some 20 miles from downtown Tampa.

Reynolds said that he had been working with AV Concepts, another of the companies responsible for rapper Shakur’s posthumous Coachella performance, and that he had even acquired the rights to a speech by Reagan to be featured.

So why were the plans axed? According to Reynolds, it was out of concern the deceased Reagan might outshadow the very-much-alive Romney. “At the time he hadn’t chosen Paul Ryan, so I think they were a little worried about his energy,” Reynolds said. “Even in a hologram form I think Reagan’s going to beat a lot of people in terms of communicating.”