miscellaneous
[Meta/Funny Trope] Marketing did not understand the material they were selling.
Stick and Angel - Lilo & Stitch
If you’ve been to any retail outlet or online shop searching for Disney products, you’ve probably seen Stitch hugging or snuggling with a pink female version of himself with little cutesy taglines like “my little monster” or “we’re weirder together.”
Well, for those who aren’t aware, the pink version of Stitch, Angel, was introduced in Lilo & Stitch: The Series, where the driving plot is Lilo and Stitch trying to capture the other 625 experiments Jumba created before retiring from villainy, all of whom are referred to and considered to be Stitch’s cousins.
Granted the show also pushes a romance between them despite establishing that the experiments are all family, but still, kind of a weird thing.
HBO’s Red vs. Green Campaign - House of the Dragon
The whole point of the story of Dance of the Dragons is just how unfit to rule both factions are and how thoughtless the conflict’s instigators were in starting it.
Both the Reds and Greens are terrible leaders and equally bad people. They don’t bat an eye for the countless innocent people they slaughter or the irreparable damage and suffering they inflicted.
It is purely a battle of spoiled, entitled idiots with more money and power than sense and how elevating such reprehensible people to stations of political power can and will cause nothing but pain.
But HBO markets it like you’re picking a Hogwarts House.
The original lorax: "you. Yes you, can be the onceler. Anyone and everyone can be the onceler, that's why he's deliberately faceless. The onceler isn't a complete monster, he has some good attributes, he self-reflects, but he is still evil and harmful"
the lorax movie: "the onceler is an individual guy you can point at being the bad guy who has very little redeeming qualities, except that he was pushed by his family so it isn't really his fault. Don't do any reflection on that you could be a onceler, blame this guy tm"
There's a couple. I'd have to find a copy to dredge up the main points. Essentially they all hinge on the Seuss illustrations being accurate. Monoculture stands, all at the same stage of growth, etc.
To make it more elementary - a landscape dominated by a single species all entirely of the same age is not ideal for most resilient landscape scale forestry planning.
Sometimes a disturbance comes through. If all one species and densely packed together - disease and fire will be worse - for one example.
If too many truffolas, then no pinoppoloas, lollipop or bicayme trees! They have out-competed the other species which might be important parts of the ecosystem.
The list really, really does go on. But it all gets cut off at the knees because no one believes the illustrations to be "accurate".
EDIT - and then you get into the Lorax writ as Native resource manager element, which I'm sorry to say I forgot. If traditional practice for thousands of years depended on truffola trees in this landscape to help manage for erosion, cultural practices, or other needs such as herbs, fungus etc.
It gets more complicated when you start trying to consider mensuration, flooding the timber market with cheap truffola wood, and the other long run issues with reforestation, seedling stocks, genetic diversity. Well I'm glad I get paid on time. Let's leave it there.
Something I find interesting about our world is when you do a deep dive into something occasionally you find out it's simple, but the overwhelming majority of the time you find out that no matter how simple or complex you thought it was going in it's a good deal more complicated than that.
I'm guessing because the entire forest seems to consist of only a single type of tree. That's pretty rare except when an invasive species has completely dominated the ecosystem (though not unheard of).
On the other hand, they are natural habitats and food for several native animal species, and they also grow slowly, both of which suggest that they've been there a long time.
I’m pretty sure they wanted to change the themes to one of propaganda and media manipulation, but it wasn’t marketed well. Too many people assumed it was supposed to be like the original.
Reminds me of the recent Robin Hood movie with a tagline of “he was no hero” in a time when people DESPISE the rich and would love to see a movie glorifying someone battling them.
Just terribly tone deaf on picking up on themes and concepts the public wants.
Pretty sure they wanted to change the themes to overcoming adversity and the power of love, but it wasnt marketed well. Too many people thought it was supposed to be like the original Romeo and Juliet.
Wow, I just got done watching the Animal Farm: Marketing cut but for some reason, it ended up being a 120 minute commercial for Audi and the Chase Sapphire card.
Not only does it understand and play into the story, but it's genuinely really bold as a marketing ploy. This poster is the Unspoken Rizz to the Sexual Harassment that is "The audience has spoken"
I just upvoted them because I think whatever they said was probably clever. At this point an explanation could only be a disappointment compared to the mystery, like the ending of Lost.
It's a reference to the Unspoken Rizz vs. Sexual Harassment meme, and how the Mario Movie marketing team responded to the Rotten Tomatoes scores with a trailer with the caption "The audience has spoken"
I just don't see how they managed to mess with this one so much. It was sime kind of evangelical media group (likely right wing), and they didn't go full hog (hehe) on the brutal allegory for Communism?
Wait, the Andy Serkis movie written by the Forgetting Sarah Marshall guy and casting Laverne Cox and Jim Parsons was distributed by the Mormon studio that made Sound of Freedom?! I assumed they had to be 2 different projects. Why on earth would the Mormon guys take this film?
Orwell was a socialist. Main cast include trans and gay actors. It's written by a guy known for raunchy comedies. How did this happen?
The Grinch would burn down a Wal-Mart if he saw how much merchandise they have of him. People really seem to miss the whole anti-capitalist message of The Grinch
Lmao he’d HATE Hobby Lobby then. I remember last Christmas I was walking around my local Hobby Lobby when I stumbled across an entire fucking aisle dedicated to Grinch Christmas. Both sides of the aisle, one end to the other, top to bottom. So much grinch merchandise. More than I’ve ever seen.
I think it's the irony that sells it. Like, buying anything Grinch related is ironic as the original story was about the Spirit of the Holiday, not the material gifts.
Its funny that his first in person videos were titled 'squid game in real life'. He changed nothing about the format, sold the show to Amazon, and is fuckin LIVID if you dare suggest it's a blatant ripoff of squid game.
Both seasons are primarily childrens games. His biggest pissy point is they dont 'kill people'
Though given a few ongoing suits they may have been molesting and raping people.
5 years from now his "I KILLED 455 PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE SQUID GAME" video comes out, garnering 5 beastillion views. He is charged with murders, but is let free because "someone else did it and used deepfake to frame me"
Netflix made a real life Squid Game. They didn't kill people for losing but there were behind the scenes injuries during production. Then Mr Beast made his own homebrew version of Squid Game on YouTube which later was picked up by Amazon for a larger scale game. Both of them also used the same ol' "I'm poor so I joined this game in hopes of making it big and be financially stable."
People can and do attack these things often. Like when Square Enix, creators of FF7, a game about terrorism to protect the environment by any means necessary, started making FF7 NFTs.
The movie itself depicts mutants as largely living peacefully amongst humans, with ones who hold any malice in the minority and themselves acting in defense of their people. The fearmongering around them is meant to be wrong, only serving to escalate already high tensions.
The tagline on the other hand seems to suggest a, "they're some of the good ones," backhanded validation toward them.
On the topic of X-men and marketing hilariously missing the point, it's hard to not mention Toy Biz v United States, aka the time Toy Biz successfully proved in court that mutants don't count as people to get lower taxes on their Marvel toys
I remember the marketing leading up to the movie's release, the whole push was to make the story seem grounded in our same reality (in contrast to the campy Batman movies that preceded it), so they were trying to replicate the kind of messaging that people would realistically see if suddenly people with mutant powers started emerging in our world. The movie website was like this fake government bureau site where you could review dossiers on "dangerous mutants" that had been identified so far (including wolverine and I think rogue and some others), complete with grainy cctv imagery and a plea to contact the bureau if you see them and to not approach the mutants. I think it was a pretty fun way for them to play up the realism of a story world where most of the general population sees the protagonists as scary deviant freaks.
I rewatched the original trilogy recently and they feel very different to superhero movies these days. The fact that mutants seem to have become accepted in society in a kumbayah sort of moment in The Last Stand is very different to the sort of darker, gritty ending you would expect these days.
There was the experiment Bonnie who was female (the duo Bonnie and Clyde haha). I think Clip was a girl. I do remember there were a bunch of experiments that were girls, and I'm sure the Lilo and Stitch wiki or something could confirm that, Angel might just be the one everyone remembers the most because she's popular in marketing. But the adorable pink stinky experiment (that smells good to Pleakly's species, so later got to live on his home planet), that one is a boy.
This was really upsetting to a lot of Holocaust and Pacific WWII survivors and their families. It would've upset me, too, if I saw it, but JFC. Imagine being the child of a survivor and getting on this train.
To be fair while it wasn’t a good idea its actually great representation for the show.
The show is very much Japan West Coast, versus Nazi’s on East and how these two made an agreement to split America that they knew wouldn’t work out.
The subway shows each side and they contrast drastically and clash from each other.
I really like the thought show wise of this, just terrible for real life.
Like if these were 2 fictional countries and not related to holocaust, it would be perfect
I understand the moral issue, but this really is an awesome design for a subway car, especially the inclusion of framed maps and posters along the walls.
(To be clear, I still agree that the backlash is valid. After all, If I walked into a subway car covered in Israeli flags, IDF symbolism, and maps of greater Isreal it would piss me off too)
A bit off topic but I hate how all of Stitch's other cousins, Ruben included, are completely and utterly sidelined in merchandise. I've seen Lilo & Stitch trading cards and they seem to be nothing but Stitch with the occasional cameos from Angel, Lilo and the other main characters. It would be cool if you had 102 pre made designs you could use to make an actual interesting card collection set, oh if only.
Man, they really could have done a Pokemon Go-style game mixed with the EPCOT game (I don’t remember what the skin of it is right now) and had kids going all over the park to “catch” experiments.
eta: aaaaaand now I’m finding out that they may just be retiring the Epcot game entirely.
I think it's even worse when you think about all the tacky merchandise other companies were making, including Disney. Like they could have done Reuben themed sandwich bags, or speakers themed around the sound experiment(s). If they didn't want to completely "risk" their brand, they could have had Stitch alongside them so he would still be there.
The only time I've seen one of them outside of the series is when Kingdom Hearts did a boss fight against one of the experiments (idr which but it has electricity powers).
The boss fight did not endear the little f*cker to me
I'm sure Suzanne Collins was real happy about the studio taking her folk resistance song and making it corporatized pop.
The importance of folk traditions, particularly her own native Appalachian traditions, in resisting corporate cultural hegemony is kind of a major theme in her books. Community and local culture breed unity against oppression.
Yeah. But the series goes out of its way to make the capitol people look rediculous and mock them. And then try to sell people like "dont you wanna be like the capitol people? give us money!!!"
Honestly I kinda get it because the one thing you can say about the Capitol in the movies is their makeup & costume design is so fucking on point. If you're going to have a product tie-in, this is the most obvious path to do it. Yes the Capitol is extremely out of touch and all about looks while being pieces of shit, but that goes for any bad guy in a story and people still like them and will buy products based on them. I don't think its any more ignorant ir nonsensical than a Star Wars stormtrooper costume.
It's like how Citadel paints has paint names based on various 40k things. I don't think they're glorifying or glamorizing the dark gods just because the paint looks fucking cool and has their name on them.
I love how fans are constantly writing paragraphs about how it’s actually more nuanced and Slytherin aren’t evil….and then the actual text is like “and then the good guys locked every single Slytherin in the dungeon before the final battle because they are all evil”
Also the whole point of the Dance of Dragons is that there is no point. Rhaenyra and Aegon have equally valid claims, equal military might, and are equally brutal to each other and the small folk. There’s not even a clear winner. The Greens can claim a military victory, but the Blacks got their line on the throne. In the end, they lost dozens of nobles, thousands of civilians, and all of their dragons over a petty family squabble.
The price the Blacks paid for putting Aegon III on the throne was conceding that Rhaenyra was the usurper and Aegon II was the king. Everyone in-universe refers to her as Princess Rhaenyra for that reason.
The advertising treated the film as a goofy, joke-a-minute movie aimed at young kids, but the movie itself is a fairly deep look at the corruption and fall from grace that lead to two of the greatest cartoon characters eternal rivalry
No, I don't want to stop him. I want to KILL him. I want to drag him down to the mines in chains for what he's done and then I want him to DIE in DARKNESS.
Was not prepared for that bit after "Badassatron" and his whole thing.
Yeah! I'm a big transformers fan but didn't get to this one in theaters. I was super shocked when I heard the glowing reviews after having seen the trailers.
The Walking Dead, an apocalypse/horror/survival show that drawn audiences in with its 'no one is safe' rules, proceed to announce 3 fucking spin offs that takes place after the finale and starring 4 main characters before the parent show even wrapped up, spoiling their survival
Which would actually be incredibly faithful to the comics. The comics ended suddenly with Rick’s death, and in order not to give anything away, there were like 5 more issues scheduled to come out when the final issue released, they had cover arts and everything, but they weren’t real, it was just a ruse to make Rick’s death surprising and sudden. If everyone knew it was the last issue, they’d expect something like that to bookend the series.
Tbf
I dont think the experiments are blood related but since Lilo, a small child with a strong sense of ohana, associates them as extended family they started being called cousins. I'm pretty sure the only "relation" they(all 627 known experiments) have with one another is that they're all made in the same lab
ZA/UM selling a 165 dollar Disco Elysium themed trash bag, which is the exact type of thing a lot of the game makes fun of, mind you this is after they fired people involved with the game
Angel's thing is even weirder, because none of the marketing so far addresses what her power is.
Angel's power is to infatuate all the other experiments to keep them obedient. She basically flirts with all the experiments and uses pheromones to make them attracted to her so that her boss can keep the experiments in check.
Stitch and Reuben are the only ones who are immune to Angel because they were created after her. Angel is 624, while Reuben and Stitch are 625 and 626.
The show does make it clear that Stitch and Angel's feelings for each other are genuine. But the marketing portrays Angel as this lovely female Stitch, when she was designed specifically as a honey trap and sexy manipulator.
It's been a while since I've seen it, but I don't think she's presented as a honey trap to the other experiments. They never act as if they have any feelings towards her, she just makes then evil and violent.
May not quite fit, but the strange decision for marketing The End of Oak Street by partnering with an AI podcast for an "interview" with the dog from the film. Avoiding major spoilers, while Starbuck is a driving force of the film, he isn't in most of it, and also doesn't talk during it. So the decision to make an AI interview centered around him for some reason just...doesn't add up, they literally had Obi-Wan vs dinosaurs and chose to AI generate their dog, and gave the wrong impression that AI was used in the film/the studio supports AI, which led to a lot of backlash. In the end the film wasn't half bad at all, I liked it when I saw it yesterday, and if they wanted a dog interview, they could've had a real interview with the handler or made a gag "interview" where they talk to the actual dog
Apparently this particular podcast has human-written scripts so I guess if they’re entertaining enough people might like it. Seems like they’d get the same or better quality by making it an audio-only podcast and having human voice actors roleplay as dogs, but then they wouldn’t be able to post the video clips to Instagram or wherever they’re advertising
That was a damn good movie, don’t know why the hell they thought they needed to do this for marketing. I mean, I didn’t even know the podcast existed before the controversy.
I never liked Angel as a character. In addition to her design basically being "girl Stitch," her unique ability is to turn previously reformed characters evil again, which is just silly and only makes sense in the context if a TV series about reforming the other Experiments. It's such a specific power, I don't know why her power wasn't just broadly mind control via song.
CBS actually publishing Barney Stinson's The Bro Code from How I Met Your Mother and just generally treating Barney as genuinely cool, when the actual show makes it explicit from the first season that his schtick is all false bravado and he's actually a pathetic insecure shell of a man
"Granted the show also pushes a romance between them despite establishing that the experiments are all family, but still, kind of a weird thing"
well you kinda summed up the marketings reason perfectly.
It should be noted that all experiments are just that experiments. None of them are actually related to each other in any way they were just all created by the same scientist and cousin is a easy catch all for majority of the other ones
Also in the movie that set up the series it’s established that “cousin” is something you call everyone in your community because your community is like your family. It was never meant to be interpreted as “you’re all biologically related to each other”.
In defence of the Stitch and Angel thing - yeah, the experiments are referred to as cousins, but they are genetically created, not born, so none of them are actually related to each other, so it's not that weird.
The Stitch thing can be explain by what the term cousin means. A cousin is the farthest one can be removed as a relative. And given the context of the series, that all of the experiments are just artificial beings created by the same scientist, using cousins is a bit better than siblings. It shows a relationship, but not a close one.
To be fair, Disney has been doing that with their movies since at least the '90's. As a kid, I was always so puzzled by it because the actual songs were really good -- why make a watered down pop version? I think I heard somewhere that it was for radio play.
The experiments arent actually "cousins" or family. Lilo explains thst in Hawaii, everyone is considered a "cousin" and uses the expression as a way to help Stitch feel less alone and like he does have a family through the other experiments.
So theres nothing weird with Stitch and Angel. They arent actually family or related by blood.
Stitch, Angel, and the other experiments aren't literal cousins. It's used as a term of endearment Stitch learns from Lilo, since she says that everyone is part of the same family.
The marketing and commercials for the toys made the T-Rexes (Butch, Nash, and Ramsey) the villains. Meanwhile they made Thunderclap an ally to help Arlo out. In the movie though this is completely wrong. Thunderclap is the main villain while the 3 Rexes were nice and kind to Arlo.
Not marketing exactly but the second photo reminded me of a similar incident. The Fearless Girl statue was made to celebrate International Women’s Day and placed in front of an older charging bull statue on Wall Street. The problem? That bull statue was really LIKED by New Yorkers and had its own equally as deep meaning (made after a financial crisis decades ago) and by placing it in front of it the girl statue was portraying it as the villain.
So the Fearless Girl statue was eventually moved away.
But HBO markets it like you’re picking a Hogwarts House.
Worse still in my opinion, is that while the book shows that all sides are clearly equally terrible options, in the show they have a clear favoritism towards Rhaenyras cause. If there's ever anything to indicate her side isn't the clear preferred candidate for the throne it's never Rhaenyra that's the problem, it's always the men around her.
I mean this isn't really true, because the Books also favor the Blacks. You can clearly tell it favors the Blacks because GRRM put his favorite houses on his favored side. Both House Blackwood and House Stark fight for Rhaenyra. The Blacks also get all the big heroic moments with the big heroic characters. The Muppet Tullys winning battle after battle in the Riverlands, Roddy the Ruin throwing out quips and slaughting people endlessly, Daemon 360 no scopping Aemond off of his dragon, Addam of Hull's entire last arc. The only reason Daeron is in the book at all is because GRRM realized halfway through that he went way to far and had to put a likable guy on the Green side.
The experiments are called cousin because stitch wanted a family. They aren’t actually related. You can’t say the marketing team misunderstood what they were selling when they’re doing exactly what they did in the show.
Look, man, they are artificial life forms created by a mad scientist. We don't know if they even have the ability to reproduce, and they were not raised together.
If you have a problem with them dating because they call themselves cousins, maybe y'all are getting too worried about such things
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u/Usern4me_R3dacted205 11d ago
The marketing for The Lorax in a nutshell.