This week, I’m going to focus on how animation is being used by many people to expand the reach of their franchises in a relatively inexpensive way. A really good example is Star Wars, with its three different animated versions of the Clone Wars. Each version enabled them to expand their franchises to new groups of fans in new ways, ultimately adding more success to the franchise as a whole and expanding profits well beyond the money made by the live action films with all the additional merchandising.
First, the 2003 series Clone Wars:
Above is a single episode of the cartoon, which at 3:24 is pretty short. All of the first “season” episodes of this show had similar lengths, shown between other shows’ episodes on the Cartoon Network. Most are fairly self-contained, like the one I have posted, in that there is little dialog, no huge character development, and no major plot aside from whatever battle is taking place. Starting with season 2, they moved to 12 minute episodes, that allowed for more character development, and larger story arcs that, at the end of season 3, led straight into movie #3: Revenge of the Sith. These short cartoons were made to intrigue children, and create excitement for the 3rd movie, as all were aired and set between film #2 & #3.
Next up is the 2008 feature-length CGI film The Clone Wars. This film takes a new direction in story-telling and animation. They focus much more on characters and on tying all the films and universes together. This film was spun off into a TV series the following year, that is still on the air. Unfortunately, Cartoon Network has yanked all the youtube clips, but you can catch the trailer here, on their website:
http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/starwars/index.html
This new series is to run for 5 seasons (they’re on #3 now, I believe) and has greatly expanded the Star Wars canon. There are now 3 distinct periods (within the story lines) to draw from for toys and merchandising: the original film trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and the clone wars period. If you step into any toy store, you’ll see that they have used this to the best possible effect. Each wave of action figures, for example, consists approximately of an even mix of toys from each section. There are t-shirts, party favors, comic books, and everything else you could think of from each of the three points in the overall Star Wars story. (and I hear they’re going to do a live-action TV show in the next few years that will be more serious and be set after the events of Return of the Jedi.
I guess I sort of went off on a tangent there, but my point is this: The people behind Star Wars have effectively leveraged their franchise into a multi-year cartoon at minimal expense (compared to shooting the live-action films) and this has enabled them to stretch out merchandising and set up a whole new generation of kids as life-long Star Wars fans. That’s an impressive use of animation over several formats (cartoon shorts, CGI films and then a CGI multi-season tv show) that shows how animation can be used to expand franchises to help their continued success long after the original media (those 6 live action films) are outside of the public consciousness.
My comments are here and here.
April 20, 2010 at 3:08 am |
I found your blog really interesting. My brother and husband were just having a discussion on how the new Star Wars movies, episodes 1-3, were targeted towards children…isn’t it interesting that they are computer animated. They think the last three movies, episodes 4-6, are equally as cheesy and somewhat made for children as the first three episodes, but they are classics. Very interesting argument.