Photo: Mazur/WireImage

Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus and Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz began hyping their joint summer tour a little over a month ago, when the two began teasing something known as “the Octopus” on their Twitters. As word of the tour broke, the duo revealed there were 50 limited edition USB drives adorned with an octopus up for grabs; the drives are stocked with Hoppus’ remix of Fall Out Boy’s “America’s Suitehearts” and other goodies. Now, Wentz confirms there will be “another chapter” of their gonzo marketing plan coming soon.

“There are 10 ideas a day, and nine of them are bad,” Wentz admits of his band’s history with schemes. “When we have a good one, we inject it in, and when we don’t we just sit back and watch the dust settle.”

The most current idea began when “We were in Australia at a bar with our wives and I’d been over-served,” Wentz says. “I got on the microphone and told Mark we were going to karaoke Blink-182 songs. He told me to shut up — and then I told him he should remix one of our songs.” In addition to the track, the drives come with a video for the remix, a photo of Hoppus with a prop octopus and a behind-the-scenes video for the shoot. Recipients also get a link to submit info for a limited-edition T-shirt. Wentz says fans who win these USB drives will also have their names and addresses added to a pool for future incorporation into their ideas, adding, “We’re like a Columbia House with games and prizes.”

“I think it’s cool to put out a remix EP on iTunes, but at the same time finding a new way to deliver things to people is interesting — you feel like you own something more when you earn it,” Wentz says of the plan that was hatched to distribute the drives. The premise, which Wentz says is “like you’re the Indiana Jones of the emo kids,” was simple: the tiny USB drives were created by Mojo Labs and distributed to Hoppus, Wentz and their friends and affiliates including the Academy Is…’ William Beckett, Panic at the Disco’s Spencer Smith, Wentz’s Angels & Kings bar in New York, and others in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Mexico City and more locations worldwide. Each person then blogged or tweeted a clue about when and where the drive could be found. “I love seeing the look on somebody’s face when they do get the drive, probably in the same way if I met Axl rose and he acted like Axl Rose,” Wentz says.

As for the overabundance of Octopus graphics, he maintains the Octopus obsession is Hoppus’ (who also has blogged extensively about the creatures). But the notoriously cryptic Wentz tells us, “I know that people have a fascination with cephalopods. There’s this interesting story I learned in junior high school: There’s a laboratory, and every time the doctors come in in the morning there’s fish missing from the tank. They don’t know what’s going on at all, and so they set up a camera at night and see an octopus getting out of the tank. It knows to go across to the fish tank, it kills fish and then knows to go back to its own tank. I think it’s the most bizarre thing ever.”

So what’s up next? “After this I think the octopus is doing his own thing. The octopus is not a Fall Out Boy thing,” Wentz says. Though he added “I think there will be future collaborations between [Fall Out Boy] and Mark and me and Mark” — Wentz remained mum on exactly how the partnership will pan out for phase two. “As long as Fall Out Boy is alive and breathing, we’ll be tinkering,” he confirms. “What if we just went to their houses and had a sleepover tour across the country?”

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