A Mission: Impossible III marketing scheme went haywire--literally--Friday when a Los Angeles Times reader in Santa Clarita mistook his friendly neighborhood newspaper rack for a device on the verge of spontaneous combustion. In this day and age, you really can't blame the guy for being a bit concerned when he inserted his quarter, opened the lid and saw a small plastic box with a few wires poking out of it sitting on top of the papers.

He subsequently called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department at 9:05 a.m., according to sheriff's office spokeswoman Deputy Dana Camarillo, and the Canyon Country division's arson and explosives team was dispatched to investigate, arriving on the scene about 20 minutes later. After spying the red plastic box, authorities proceeded to "render the device useless," Camarillo said. Or, to put it in more Mission: Impossible-friendly terms: They blew that sucker up!

As it turned out, that sinister-seeming object was one of approximately 4,500 digital music players placed in Times dispensers throughout the city programmed to play the Mission: Impossible theme when the rack's door was opened.

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Law enforcement officials received several other calls later in the day and the West Los Angeles federal police called in the sheriff's office bomb squad at one point, but by then the various departments had received word of Paramount Pictures' marketing campaign. "I think Paramount is pretty happy about it," Mark Kurtich, senior VP of operations for the Times, said, referring to the bonus publicity that inevitably accompanies an actual explosion.