The Extratextuals

Franchising, Merchandising, and Licensing: Sleekest and Weakest of the Geekest

2007 is over, and organizations like the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science must now look back in judgment at a year’s worth of media production.  Unlike those august institutions, however, we here at The Extratextuals want to look for craftsmanship, innovation, and experimentation (and lack thereof!) not just in films and television programs themselves, but also in the networks of additional, extra texts that increasingly surround one another in our media-saturated experiences. 

So without further ado, we present to you our 2007 Awards Extraordinaire, highlighting the products and productions of the last year that demand recognition in our dense, overlapping, and cross-pollinated media landscape.  We’ll call attention to those that we think worked extremely well, but we’ll also point to some stinkers too—those that just didn’t seem to get it.  Of course, if you think we’ve got it all wrong, the real fun might happen in the comments section, where our picks can be interrogated, amended, and enhanced.  

To start off this series, we’ll explore Franchising, Merchandising, and Licensing.  A far cry from the austere nominees of the Golden Globes and Oscars, these are the categories in which the media industries and their creative personnel have worked tirelessly and without pause to extend intellectual properties to their maximum potential, multiplying them across product lines and across platforms.  As my terrible subtitle implies, these categories tend to involve appeals to those audiences (like myself) that will intensely follow properties from one market to another.  So for comics, toys, games, and other things you might expect to find in The Android’s Dungeon, read more below the fold…

Read more…

Uncategorized books, comics, franchises, licensing, movies, television

…don’t be alarmed.  Our blog might look a bit strange, and have a few hiccups, over the next 12-24 hours as we experiment with shifting over to a new blog engine that can better accommodate our needs. So yes, we know the RSS feed is broken at the moment, and that a few formatting details look a little bit off.  Rest assured that things will be back to normal by tomorrow morning, and better than ever. 

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Too humble to post the link here himself, it seems, but fellow Extratextual Ivan Askwith recently had an article published on Slate, entitled “Apple vs. Everyone.” The lead-in asks, “Every media conglomerate wants to start its own online venture. Will iTunes survive?” Like one of my favorite quirky comics as a kid, Marvel’s What If? series, Ivan plays out different scenarios in the media corporations’ staring match with Apple for iTunes delivery. None of them involve Scarlet Witch giving birth to mutant triplets, or Puck becoming Canada’s Prime Minister, as an issue of What If? might’ve offered, but the analysis is well worth checking out

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1. Where Can Hillary Go Next?Ben Grossman poses an interesting question in a column for Broadcasting and Cable: with the political campaigning beginning so early, and with all the early primaries, how will candidates keep people interested? Grossman wonders if the key candidates will simply run out of shows on which to appear as guests. Translated, can one’s brand run out of extratextual outlets? Come May, will we see guests challenging Chef Cat Cora on Iron Chef, having a scripted spat with Vince McMahon on WWE Smackdown, or appearing as Jack Bauer’s grandparents on 24?

2. Dual Purpose AdvertisingA new trailer has been released for The Golden Compass, the first of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books to be made into a film, due out this Christmas. This time, the trailer lacks the egregious fastframe spoiler that was in the teaser. Interestingly, though, it dedicates a fair amount of screen time to the Panserbjørn (speaking polar bear) Iorek Byrnison, no doubt to help advertise the Panserbjørn-riding computer game as much as the film.

3. Gossip Lives EternalThe first of the fall shows to be picked up till the end of the season is Gossip Girl. Despite ho-hum ratings, The CW is sticking by their rich waifs, so it seems.

4. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”A quick visit to DVDtalk.com proved wholly unsettling. Apparently, there is a porno Brady Bunch film called Not the Bradys XXX, and to celebrate the launch of its DVD, Xcritic.com “will be giving away pieces of the wardrobe worn in the film including [...] Marcia’s yellow and red panties [worn] during [the] car wash scene.” This in the wake of the original Marcia Brady’s recent tell-all revelations of a trist with sister Jan, and suddenly The Brady Bunch has way more edge than I ever thought possible: all in a good day’s work for two extratextuals

                                         5. Earl and Office Web PresenceNBC has set up a blog for Randy, the fantastic, Homeresque sidekick in My Name is Earl. Very misguided. First, the site is covered with ads for Earl, and thus doesn’t keep within diegetic frame. Are NBC stupid enough to think someone’s going to stumble into this site without already knowing when the show is on? Second, Randy doesn’t even have a computer in the show, and so it’s nonsensical to give him a blog. Third, it’s simply not that funny. In short, it neither extends the world of Earl in a feasible manner, nor is it entertaining unto itself. Strike One.

Strike Two comes from NBC’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity website for The Office. It starts off well, with an overdone flashy intro. But, like Randy’s blog, it can’t resist breaking frame, by putting an NBC logo in the top corner, and by allowing one to list one’s favorite Office character and episode. One can earn “Shrute Bucks” (also possible as an application on Facebook) and buy decoration for one’s desk. And one can in theory work one’s way up the corporate ladder with better jobs and so forth. It’s all quite tedious, though, and while The Office finds considerable humor in everyday tedium, there’s nothing really to be gained or learnt here. As with Randy’s blog, it’s as if someone told NBC they need to create a “funky” website, yet very little thought went into why.

I’m on a mission to find really good websites now, so please point me in the direction if you know of any.

Uncategorized Brady Bunch, Golden Compass, Gossip Girl, My Name is Earl, The Office, trailers, websites

As I previously blogged about, Ivan, Derek, Jason Mittell, and I took part in a fantasy draft of the new shows for this TV season. Each of us ended up with 6 shows, one of which is our “Designated Stinker,” a show we earmark for early cancellation. My DS is Life is Wild, whose pilot I soldiered through when it played at the Paley Center in early September. Well, tonight it hit the air. I wanted to check that its odor was sufficiently stinky. What I found was a different show. Read more…

Uncategorized CW, Life is Wild, pilots

It’s a bit last minute, I know — and I don’t believe it’s open to the public — but Jonathan encouraged me to write a quick post about a panel discussion I’ll be participating in this evening for the Producers’ Guild of America. Since I’m speaking, I’m doubt I’ll be in a position to take notes, but I’ll try to do a post-game write-up in the next few days addressing any interesting points that come up.In the meantime, if you see this and have questions you’d like me to try and raise with the other speakers, post in the comments and I’ll do what I can.And now, the details:

CREATING BLOCKBUSTER WORLDS:
TRANSMEDIA DEVELOPMENT & PRODUCTION

Wednesday, September 26 (6:30PM – 9PM)

As exemplified by TV series such as Lost and Heroes , video games such as Halo and the work of creators such as JJ Abrams, Joss Whedon, Zach Snyder and Kevin Smith, storytelling has made a quantum leap in the 21st century. Development and production of a single rich narrative across multiple media platforms is the next exciting challenge being faced by producers in the digital age. Right now, major studios, advertising agencies, video game publishers and dozens of Fortune 500 companies are incubating concepts and developing intellectual properties capable of both enthralling and interacting with audiences who will enjoy them on their TV sets, computer screens, game consoles, as well as in the form of theatrical films, graphic novels and toys. There are only a handful of producers with extensive experience in the lucrative field of trans-media storytelling and production, and the PGA will be bringing them to you in this exciting seminar.

Producers who attend this seminar will become familiar with the following:

• The definition, history and near-future of trans-media storytelling, development and production
• Success stories and notorious trans-media failures
• Creative and technical elements that form successful trans-media franchises
• What (and who) you need to know to understand the ambition and scope of trans-media production
• The conceptual building blocks for successful trans-media development and implementation
• Facing the challenges of working with large conglomerates
• Rollout strategies
• The role of product placement, sponsors and promotions
• What goes into developing a trans-media deal
• Examples, illustrations and models

Read more…

Uncategorized speaking, transmedia

We all seem to have our set price for how much any media should cost. I’m cheap, so mine are likely lower than many. Only two of my (admittedly small collection of) PS2 games were ever bought new, since $50 seems too much. I don’t buy CDs anymore, only singles, and even then only in $10 batches. I all but gave up on live theatre after leaving England where, as a student, I lived ten minutes from most theatres of note, and could get student rush seats for $20 or lower. When I go to the movie theatre in New York, I usually try to see two films for the price of one, since $11.75 is too much for most films. I get most of my books through publisher payments for doing reviews, since I don’t like spending $30 on a book. I don’t buy DVDs for the most part, since they’re too pricey.

This places most of my media purchases between $1 and $15. Now, on one hand, I’m very aware that there is little logic to this, comparatively. A video game will offer potentially hundreds of hours of entertainment if it’s good, yet I won’t spend $50 on it? Ditto with a CD for $20? But I don’t make sense, so let’s not rely on the presence of a rational Jonathan to solve this issue. Instead, let me push past the irrationality of me, and discuss how these cost decisions affect my consumption. Price makes certain types of consumption more likely and other less likely. Read on below the fold. Read more…

Uncategorized binge fandom, price

Over the past week, Jonathan has offered a great overview of all the new programs being offered by the broadcast networks. But for me, their appeal on their own isn’t as important as whether I have room for them amidst the shows I’m still watching from last season. So I thought I’d offer a complement to Jonathan’s review of the new network menu by sharing the selections I’ll personally be making. I’d encourage you to post your own here too.

To begin, there are a couple things I should explain about my television watching habits.

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Welcome. As we launch this blog, it’s perhaps important thatwe explain what it is, what we hope it would be, and hence what you can expectfrom us.

This is a blog about the media. However, with other blogs ontelevision, film, and the media in general, we wanted to carve out a specificniche. So our blog will focus primarily on the extratextuals that surround themedia. By this, we mean everything but the show itself: previews,merchandising, industry buzz, branding, interviews, posters, spatial context, temporalcontext, related websites, ARGs, spinoffs, spoilers, schedules, bonusmaterials, transmedia extras, games, YouTube clips, etc. But we’re interestedin these things not to be arcane or eccentric; rather, we believe that theextratextuals often make the show whatit is. Hence this blog is about the mediation of media.

At times we’ll cheat and talk about programs, films,computer games, comics, books, etc. themselves. But this isn’t a game ofScrabble or Risk, so cheating’s allowed.

It is also a group blog. “We” are Ivan Askwith, JonathanGray, and Derek Johnson. To study the extratextuals as important is to decenterthe show itself as the necessary object of discussion, and by writing as agroup, we hope to decenter any one of us as being the show itself. We’llcertainly disagree with each other, and engage in discussion, and hope you getinvolved too.

At times we’ll wax academic, at times we’ll justenthusiastically post about things we’ve seen and recommend, and at times we’llpost off the cuff. We invite you to do the same in responding.

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We’ve finally started managing to get these into separate pages for easier future reference… so below you’ll find brief autobiographical statements. Click on our respective names for more in-depth profiles, including our individual media preferences.

Ivan Askwith

I am a recent alum of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where I wrote a thesis which serves as the first draft of a more complete work I’m (ostensibly) in the process of writing about television’s ongoing transformation into an “engagement medium.” This effort is being both helped and hindered by my new full-time role as a Creative Strategist at Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency based in Brooklyn, NY. If this is slowing down my output as a writer, though, it’s well worth it: I’ve been able to make the leap from academia to put at least one foot back into “the industry,” where I’m able to use the research and theorizing I did at MIT to help explore new possibilities for transmedia extensions around films, television series, and consumer brands.

Derek Johnson

I am a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies within the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My dissertation examines media franchises spanning television, film, comic books, video games, and merchandising, asking how they have developed historically along creative, economic, and cultural trajectories. I have published articles and book chapters in New Review of Film and Television, Film and Comic Books, and Fandom: Communities and Identities in a Mediated World.  

Jonathan Gray

An international being, I was raised in Toronto, Canada; Surrey, England; Perth, Australia; Singapore; Hong Kong; Vancouver, Canada; and since then have been a resident of Leeds, England; London, England; Oakland, CA; and now Queens, NY. I am an avid watcher of television, but also an on-again, off-again film buff, lit lover, PS2 player, and music lover.

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