Commentator: David Serchuk, Writer - Movie Tie-ins

Movies aren't just movies anymore. They're promotional vehicles, as everyone figured out after Star Wars. And today more energy goes into promotional ties-in for say, "Wild Wild West," than the film itself. Which is okay because the cholesterol from the "Wild Wild West" happy meal takes only a 20 minutes off your life, whereas watching "Wild Wild West" takes 2 hours.

I bring up food only because nobody capitalizes on movie tie-ins like fast food chains. Ironically, as entertainment "events" acquire the same forgettable character as fast food, their non-biodegradable tie-ins are not "for a limited time only." They're now being collected by that de facto curator of past fast food promotions -- the internet auction site.

Right now ebay offers some 5,000 Burger King items - none of them burgers, most of them Pokemon. But some past Burger King tie-ins are still out there on the web. For example, in 1991 BK offered toys for "Captain Planet"-the environmental avenger, an incredibly forgettable cartoon that presented environmentalism in a package as appetizing as something deep fried your way. In other words to honor environmentalism Burger King served up (plastic toys) that wound up clogging our landfills - and years later ebay. Then, in 1993 Burger King offered a "save the animals" tie-in. Ask any cow how well that one worked.

McDonald's ebay pages, by comparison read like little more than a shrine to the lapsed Beanie Baby market.

But McDonald's did lasso this season's tie-in trophy Toy Story II, and is in an exclusive ten-year contract with Disney. Unfortunately for them that contract post-dates "Aladdin" but includes "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Giving rise to the phrase: Want gruel with that?

Naturally, restaurants other than the big boys tie-in too. Usually with smaller movies and TV programs. Not necessarily art house fair like English Patient English muffins, more along the lines of a 1986 Roy Rogers tie-in with the "Snorks." Remember them? You're not alone, no one else does either: the "Snorks" had a starting and ending bid of $3.99 on ebay. But before Roy Rogers was even a restaurant he was a person. A person with promotional tie ins. A person who endorsed another ebay item the 1950's era Roy Rogers "fire brander" kit; a device that burned horse outlines onto wood, and-possibly--children. With toys like that how can you not start a fast food chain?

ebay is supposed to be used only by people over 18, yet the movies with tie-ins are seldom marketed to adults. And that's where my hours of research have paid off big time, this is the one that's going to make me. My idea is for McDonald's to offer the ultimate Godfather tie-in, a filet o' fish wrapped in a newspaper. I'm still working on the horse-head burrito.




Commentary by Mitchell Stephens - The Model-T stage: the Internet in its Immaturity.

Every new technology - and this certainly includes every new communications technology -- goes through a period when it is immature and unformed. The Model-T stage, we might call it. This period can last a long time

Writing, for example, was invented in Sumeria and Egypt more than five thousand years ago. But, for the first five hundred years of its history, scribes did little more than record business transactions and data on the flooding of the Nile. For the first five hundred years of writing, in other words, no one thought to scribble down a story.

The earliest newspapers - four hundred years ago -- began as lists of items presented as they arrived in the print shop: Someone's political prospects might be touted on page one; that person's death reported on page five. The first editor that we know of - the first person charged with placing news items in some coherent order - did not appear until many years later.

There are countless other examples of new forms of communications struggling to find their way. And one thing all these "new media" have in common during this stumbling Model-T stage is that hardly anyone is aware that this is the stage they are at. In the first few centuries of printing, for example, no one announced that the products of their presses were still primitive and imagined Tolstoy or The New Yorker. We usually see ourselves as standing at - or, more commonly, past - the apogee of human artistic and intellectual progress, not somewhere on the upward slope.

The Model-T stage is, of course, precisely where the Internet is currently at. (TV, I would argue, hasn't gotten much further.) Despite all the billions of dollars that are now being gambled on the Internet's future, it seems unlikely that we are any better at envisioning that future than folks in Henry Ford's time were at envisioning interstates or malls or even cars that didn't require cranking.

Clicking our way around the Web can certainly be interesting. Undoubtedly driving a Model-T seemed pretty cool at the time, too. However, it is quite likely that we have not yet seen the developments that will do for the Internet what the story did for writing, or what the editor did for the newspaper, or what the gear shift did for the automobile. When it comes to the Internet, we are still dealing with, to continue the analogy, an automobile with running boards and no side windows, and we are still users, analysts, investors - driving unpaved roads.