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While we are not particularly ashamed to admit that we long ago drank the fermented-horse-urine flavored Kool-Aid and that Borat had us at, "Hello, is it now time for make sex with your sister?" we can nonetheless still see why Fox might be afraid that the movie's buzz has outstripped its overall awareness, especially in parts of the country where the ersatz-Kazakh instigator may have narrowly averted a fatal lynching during filming. Inevitably, the studio's prolonged press blitz is draining all the fun from the rape, incest, and Jew-down-the-well jokes that made us fall in love with the incorrigible, sibling-schtupping scamp in the first place, as illustrated by this meet-cute with a CNN reporter:

Becky Anderson: So just who is Borat Sagdiyev?

Borat Sagdiyev: I am son of Asimbala Sakdijev and Boltok The Rapist. I am former husband of Marlian Tulliakbi, who was daughter of Urriana Tulliakbi and Boltok the Rapist. I am from Keczek, which is a town in Kazakhstan, located three miles north from the fence of Jewtown. And Kazakhstan is locate between Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. [...]

Becky Anderson: Let me talk a little about Pamela Anderson, because you went to America effectively to find her. What made you so desperate to find her?

Borat Sagdiyev: She is a very beautiful woman. Wowoweewow!! ...Yes? Very nice. She is unlike any Kazakh woman I have ever seen. Pamela only had teeth that grow on inside of her mouth. And she have more hair on her head than on her back.

Becky Anderson: I wondered whether there was any opportunity for me. I've got plough experience. I've got no history of retardation in the family. I'm not Jewish. Any chance that you and I could...

Borat Sagdiyev: Well, I don't want to go on wrong track, because last time I buy a wife, she was very good for first three years then suddenly she started grow hair on her chest, voice became very deep. Borat and her how you say, did not work well.

It's not to hard to imagine weary reporters joylessly gathering after their two minutes on the junket treadmill and asking each other, "Hey, did you get the one with Boltok the Rapist, or Maktar the Jew-Drowner? Drowner? Yeah, me too. At least I got a sound-bite of him offering to buy me from my husband for two goats and a crippled midwife." But even in the middle of Fox's release-trimming panic attack, THR says that studios are already locked in a bidding war for a movie starring Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's only currently underexploited alter-ego, with Universal supposedly willing to pay $42 million for the right to make Cohen exhaust every last gay-Austrian-TV-host-coming-on-to-taken-aback-male-journalist trick at his disposal on a future promotional tour.

[Photo: Getty Images]