Friday, June 13, 2008

Revamps are NOT about Relevance


Today's NYT has an article about corps "revamping" familiar franchises in order to make them "relevant" to the mythical iPhoneperpetualtxt'n'kewltweenerdemo.

Filled with such *yawn* inspiring quotes as:

Even Mickey Mouse is getting an update, although the Walt Disney Company is still mulling what tweaks to make.

“I love classic Mickey, but he needs to evolve to be relevant to new generations of kids,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said in an interview.


Which we seem to hear about every 5 years like clockwork these days.

The real reason behind such obviously wrong-headed revamps is not at all about "out of touch" execs failing to reach the kewlkidz, it's that the corps are desperate to maintain all possible TM and Copyright as they can, just in case crazy people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig ever succeed in educating Congress on the purpose of Idea Limited Monopoly Law. (Don't call it Intellectual Property. Once you do that, you've all ready lost the fight.)

And so, they tweak, change, revamp and register just to make sure they end up with something more to own.

And we get to suffer through "Loonatics."

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