#shfcomics

   You should rly come visit me sometime! You’re like my longest internet friendship and we’re always like a couple hours away from each other. I’d love to show you the city some day :)   

OMG!!!!!! a good question ok  ive actually thought abt this extensively and it’d probably be

1. good grief

2. let em eat cake

3. ready, aim, marry me!

4. burning love (the club sauce joke gets me every time)

      Out of our readings for the week, for this post, I will focus on P. David Marshall’s “The New Intertextual Commodity”. He offers plenty of media theory here, but basically put, this essay explains that media is getting more overlapped, complex, intricate because audiences can handle it, and love it. Additionally, successful intertextual works in this modern era must recognize that the patterns they lay out will get broken, therein lies the audience’s pleasure and play with their relationship to the work.

     For my application of analysis through “The New Intertextual Commodity”, I have selected an article from Bloomberg Business: “How Disney Bought Lucasfilm.” Here, Devin Leonard reports on the key points of the deal’s formation, and includes discussion of what Star Wars products—film, television, merchandise—Disney will bring us in the future. Response to this news dropping was overwhelmingly positive from many fans as the article notes, “The fans, too, had watched what happened when Disney bought Pixar and Marvel and many felt that the company could be trusted with R2-D2 and Princess Leia.” The comparisons to the conglomerate’s past publicized media purchases are apt: this article definitely provides example of Marshall’s words.

     As I said, one aspect of the Marshall reading is his section of, “Commodification Work”, about expansion in media companies. After using Time Warner and AOL as an example, he summarizes, “As these industrial processes have developed, there have been concerted efforts to connect the various cultural industries whether in ownership structures or singular relationships around a particularly prominent cultural commodity. Instead of an end product, there is a serial form of production where each product in the series is linked through a network of cross-promotion.” A lot going on here, but my interpretation is an explanation of he importance of buying more media properties to expand your reach, make audience get even more in-depth to your stories. Possibility of big crossovers not explicitly discussed in the text, but is supported by it. Both the Disney narrative and the Star Wars narratives both get expanded in a way, and as we will see, fan response definitely supports this.

     My main example for an outside link to support my analysis is the following video, “Disney Princess Leia — Star Wars Disney Princesses!”. 

      This video was first uploaded to YouTube November 5, 2012, less than a week after news about broke about Disney’s Star Wars purchase, and a majority of its (at the time of this writing) 11,824,064 views come from the first month of its release. This video is just the tip of the iceberg for crossover fan works that have emerged from the inspiration this purchase had wrought. Audiences are clearly eager to explore what exactly this means for Star Wars and Disney, ready to bend rules and share their own ideas about the purchase and the worlds it’s made up of. “…the pleasure of the game is that rules are made and remade, transformed and shifted by the players.” Just as Marshall’s essay concludes.

Marshall, P. “The New Intertextual Commodity.”

Leonard, Devin. "How Disney Bought Lucasfilm." Bloomberg News. 7 March 2013: Online.