culture

Why Originality – and Unoriginality – May Not Matter To Media Success

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(Tamara had a great post last week on the paradox of originality versus people seeking original works.  Spinning off from that, I think I've got a bead on why originality is sometimes rewarded in media – and as well why sometimes stunning unoriginality is not).

Are you getting tired of vampires?

I've been tired of vampire fiction, movies, what have you for quite awhile.  i've seen it all, heard it all, and by now I have nearly no interest whatsoever in the whole vampire genre and its spawn.  I started getting tired of it around Anne Rice's heyday, and most young people reading "Twilight" today probably think Anne Rice is a cajun dish.

I can't be the only one tired of vampires in every media known to man.  Yet they're everywhere.

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Celebrity Presence And The Failed Die-Out

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Awhile ago a variety of celebrities declared themselves dead, not Tweeting and such until enough donations to fight AIDS came in.  Despite this being for a good cause, it was a failure at the time as noted.  The site now appears to have donations up to par, but it sort of looks like  . . . well judge for yourself (http://buylife.org/).

So why didn't this death-on-social-media have an immediate influx of donations?  I think part of it was the odd, kind of self-centered method of raising funds and the tastelessness of it.  The other part was that the celebrities stopped being celebrities.

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Cross-Cultural Efforts and ‘Not Getting It’

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Few discussions of business start with the words "So, I was watching Godzilla: Final Wars" but this is going to be one of them.

So, I was watching "Godzilla: Final Wars", which was a giant festival of Kaiju-on-film (plus a lot else) done before the Godzilla movies took a hiatus.  In it, among many, many other famous monsters, was a parody of the American Godzilla.  Let us say this "Zilla" was not well treated in the movie, and it made me think about how the American Godzilla film frankly didn't get what Godzilla is about – and what that means for adaption of foreign material and ideas.

The American Godzilla treated the monster as having no personality – it was essentially a natural disaster.  The Godzilla films (and most Kaiju films, really) have creatures with personality.  Yes they're highly destructive, but they're highly destructive characters. The American film didn't get that.

Adapting foreign films, shows, and ideas to American media – or indeed adapting media from one culture to another – has one large risk well-illustrated by this film.

The risk of Not Getting It.

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