Philippine Basketball Association Team Names
Rebeca Eckler loves her name:
How much does it cost to achieve literary immortality? In the case of Rebeca Eckler, a Canadian journalist and writer, about $7,000. Two years ago, Eckler paid that princely sum at a charity auction to have her name used as a character in the next novel by her favorite author, fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood.
Sega Europe is polling the world (or a reasonable sample thereof) to name the new alien baddies in the next iteration of its legendary Sonic The Hedgehog franchise. My vote? The Darkmood.
Sonic is cool and all, but he’s no Crash Bandicoot.
A number of haloed Hindu gods and goddesses have debuted in the frenetic world of animation over the past five years. Their appearance marks a shift from a decades-long period in which Indian children grew up almost exclusively on American TV and movie characters, including Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and Spider-Man.
Like many couples, my wife and I have a deal; we take turns picking which movie we’re going to see next. I usually look for an action-adventure; she typically chooses a romantic comedy. As luck would have it, it was her turn over the holidays, and she dragged me along to see the new Disney film Enchanted.
I’d heard very little about it, other than the fact that it starred that McDreamy character from Grey’s Anatomy. That’s one strike against it already, I thought.
Was I wrong! It turned out that I liked everything about Enchanted, from the gently subversive, stereotype-flipping story (of course), to the clever animation (a fresh homage to the classic Disney tradition we thought was gone forever), to the witty songs (by Alan Menken of The Little Mermaid fame), to the inspired casting (including Susan Sarandon as the villainess, Amy Adams as Giselle, and, yes, Patrick Dempsey as her love interest).
What struck me immediately after the credits had rolled was what a smart branding move Disney had made. What’s been the knock on Disney’s animated films? They’re too saccharine. They’re too cookie-cutter. They’re too “The Hero’s Journey”. The Shrek series has made a killing mocking the Disney way.
Now, for the first time since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Disney has an answer. It’s the Saturday Night Live strategy: there’s nothing more powerful than a brand having fun with its own image. Nobody can do a better imitation of you than you. A culture that can afford to laugh at itself is a very healthy culture.
Shrek’s going to have to find a new gig.
You might think Blair Rudes has one of the few fail-safe careers in Hollywood. He trains directors and actors in lost, or dying, languages. Having worked on the sets of both The New World and the forthcoming The Ruins, he’s coached actors in Virginia Algonquian and Yukatec Maya. It would seem that when you’re translating dialogue into a moribund tongue, it’s hard to go wrong. First, there’s not much competition. Second, who’s going to fault this kind of detective work?
Believe it or not, somebody will. Rudes didn’t work on Dances with Wolves, but apparently it’s well-known how the native dialogue took a glaring wrong turn in that film.
The argument probably began in the 1980s, when frequenters of gaming arcades discovered that it could be more fun to vanquish each other than computer-controlled characters. Now gaming was competitive, had it become a sport? Ever since, there have been regular attempts to declare competitive gaming the Next Big Thing – which the British public has just as regularly ignored.
The latest, however, really does look different. The mega-budget Championship Gaming Series (CGS) launches on Sky television over Christmas with prime-time coverage. It aims to embed competitive videogaming in the national consciousness – and early indications suggest that it may succeed.
It’s official — ”jacking” is the next big thing for games. A common skill in the Grand Theft Auto series, it has now become a key addition to the Crash Bandicoot series with Crash of the Titans. This latest platformer from Sierra introduces a new technique where Crash dizzies an enemy, jumps on its back, possesses it with a mojo mask and makes it do his bidding for a short while.
If, like me, you’re both a theme park and a Harry Potter fan, you’ve already heard that Universal Orlando, in a major coup, has won the right to recreate the Harry Potter experience. Debuting in 2009, “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” will become the new anchor of Universal’s underrated Islands of Adventure theme park. Watch out, Disney!
I think of even greater interest is the possibility of author J.K. Rowling authorizing the construction of the British version of her world. The possibilities are intriguing, to say the least.
Imagine turning one of London’s many shopping streets (like Leadenhall, which plays the part in the film version) into a genuine Diagon Alley. From that starting point think of boarding the Knight Bus for a trip to the real King’s Cross Station, where an authentic recreation of the famed Hogwarts Express is waiting on Platform 9 and 3/4. While you’re being whisked north to Yorkshire, dream of ending your journey at Hogwarts, where the Sorting Hat will assign you to your “house”, and you’ll be free to explore the many and varied “attractions” of both the castle itself and the surrounding countryside.
Could it be done poorly? Of course. But could it be done extraordinarily well? I think so, and not for an inordinate amount of money.
What would such a development mean for the British tourism industry, particularly the north of England? You only have to consider what (improbably) “The Lord of the Rings” has done for New Zealand to get excited about the prospect.
The New York Times has a strong story on the marketing strategy behind the impending release of Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment in the long-running Die Hard series, starring Bruce Willis:
Tom Rothman, a co-chairman of Fox, said the studio consciously took advantage of the summertime action-movie gap in its decision to release its fourth Die Hard on June 27, five days after Universal’s Evan Almighty and a week before Transformers, from Paramount and DreamWorks. A surfeit of fantasy and computer-generated visual effects has left a hunger in the audience for real things, Mr. Rothman added. Over the next few weeks Fox will tease that perceived appetite with a marketing campaign that promotes John McClane with the words: No mask. No cape. No problem.
Of course, the studios invariably “jockey for position” with respect to release date and genre, but this campaign marks a rarer case of more directly positioning a film against its competition. Nicely done.