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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44992 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Now lets be fair, this tactic is approximately as old as mass media is.

Slamming out barely-coherent sequels to books that became unexpected bestsellers, producing a whole series of films based on one hit, and using completely unrelated scripts with the familiar character names swapped in, or making a spinoff TV show using some side character just so people might watch what would otherwise be a generic sitcom.

You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.

It probably does hit harder for media properties that have a long history and have mostly avoided being exploited or cheapened for years or decades upon decades. But those media properties will be viewed as untapped gold mines by producers, rather than precious natural resources where further development should be banned and tourism restricted to maintain their pristine condition.

I guess I'd say that I agree with you and yet the proven preference of the median consumer/viewer is that they just want to see more of [thing they like] produced and aren't too picky about quality, so given that there's no enforceable rule against slapping an existing franchise's logo on an otherwise unrelated work or spitting out a low-quality sequel, spinoff, or adaptation, it is all but inevitable that it will happen to a series that you love... unless said franchise just isn't popular enough to warrant such sequels, spinoffs, etc.

You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.

Harry Potter.

Yep, and then more recently The Hunger Games.

But then we see the point further proven with how heavily the HP franchise is being ridden by the rights owners.

Every piece of intensely popular media is either new, or "ridden by the rights owners", short of improbable edge cases. It's nearly tautological.

Yes, that's why the OP is observing the phenomenon we're discussing.

I just pointed out that this isn't recent.

One of the few pieces of media that has achieved massive cultural cachet and has not yet been immediately adapted and otherwise exploited to produce scads of content of varying quality is Calvin and Hobbes, and that is only because the creator is alive and actively protecting his work from legal reproduction.

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