I’m sure you’re disappointed to hear that the Oogieloves film has tanked terribly. This may be record tankitude.
I of course don’t follow children’s television much, unless it’s about Hasbro’s marketing departiment going “WTF” over brightly colored pony fandom. However I had seen the posters for this film when I went to watch a Rifftrax and figured it was some other franchise I’d ignored.
Turns out as I dug deeper it was an independent kid’s film, best summarized by a commenter at gawker as trying to look like a franchse. I thought it was a franchise and am kind of surprised to discover it’s bounced around for 3 years before coming to theaters to fail.
So I’m getting the impression this little failure is an example of trying to create “insta-franchise” that didn’t work. Can I understand why it was tried? Sure – if people think it’s a franchise they may feel it’s reliable or predictable – franchises don’t even have to be “good” per se to succeed. The thing is that a franchise builds on a series of past experiences, of which people had none to go on.
I also think a lesson can be taken in the internet age, the one of instant fame and viral effects. Yes those things can build a franchise, yes you can create something fast, yes you can get attention. But you can’t pretend you have something you don’t have.
The Oogieloves could learn a lot from the Kardashians and Honey Boo-Boo. This, by the way, is probably something I’ll never type again.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.