Well, as promised, I have been to the official Star Wars site to see what the big news is, and came away more than a little furious.
The main page shows Leia and R2 during the Tantive IV battle in A New Hope, with the title card "On May 4th, all will be revealed. Click on that, and you're taken to a the "Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray" site, which includes a grid of bar graphs representing several countries around the world. Choose your country, and you're given a cascading slideshow of behind-the-scenes images, nearly all of which I'd already seen. The shows abruptly stops with a "Share to Reveal More" button, with the message to "come back throughout the day to see more images as they are revealed." Sure enough, I checked back after five minutes, after a similar button in the upper right had button had gone from "18 percent complete" to "25 percent complete," and I got five or six more images. To be fair, some of them were new to me.
The idea here seems to be that we, the Star Wars fan community, need to band together to show how much we stand behind this release before we can learn more about it. That we have to personally go out and take part in promoting this occasion to our friends and family — essentially becoming a tool of the marketing department in the process — before we can find out exactly what special features are coming on a collection of movies that we've all bought three times already.
I'm trying really hard not spew venom on you, the hapless reader, as I write this. I'm trying really hard not to bring everybody down with what will be, for me, a momentary annoyance until Fox, who seems to be behind this little debacle, gets the required number of free Facebook ads. By the time most people read this, it will all be over, we'll all know exactly what we have to look forward to, and even I will think back to this as merely a mild annoyance.
But brother, do these people have a lot to learn about manipulating a fan base.
As I've mentioned before, I am a big user of Apple products. Now there's a company that knows a thing or two about getting the most of their zealot-like user base. Ruminating on the capabilities and arrival dates of new Apple products is busy hobby for many (me included), and is actually a livelyhood for a chosen few. And Apple knows just how to spike interest in new products, with a very simple, and so far successful, formula.
First rule of Apple products is you do not talk about Apple products. You say nothing for long periods of time about what you're building, who will be building it, when it will be released, and why you'll want one. This means even if you've released an iPhone every year in June since you've been making iPhones, you don't confirm that you're doing it this year no matter how many people ask you.
Of course, this results in a lot of the professional rumor-mongers I just mentioned writing articles about whether or not Apple will stick to their schedule. This, in turn, generates exponentially more publicity for saidsame product than if just came out and said "We're building this, we'll tell you more about it later" — which is essentially what Fox did with this Bluray release.
Second, once you have something to show, you release a cryptic teaser about a special event you're holding. The teaser itself should reveal the nature of the event (i.e., computers, iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc.,) but not much more than that. This will cause the pundits I mentioned to go into informational overdrive, speculating even more rampantly about what we, the Apple faithful, will or will not see. Again, Fox did this — telling us when they were going to tell us more in very specific terms; at 6 a.m. PDT today, in this case.
The final, and most critical step, is when you have this special event — when you've reached the appointed day and time — you actually tell people something worth showing up for. Apple hasn't always come through in this regard; for example, it's hard to get worked up over a new version of iPhoto unless it does something really new and amazing (the last one didn't, IMHO). But generally, I find Apple special events well worth tuning into. I've watched them by livestreaming, downloading them after the fact, and once even followed one on a liveblog in my iPhone on my way to a Nashville doctor's appointment. The point is that once the event rolled around, Apple stopped jerking us around, and actually told us something.
Fox completely failed to do that today.
Instead, they jerked us around, and did the electronic equivalent of making us beg for what they'd already promised us. They made us go stand in the corner until they decided we'd been good enough for what they'd already told us we could have — some simple details on something we're going to give them money for. And since this is the company that is still trying to make money off its official website through the totally-not-worth-it Hyperspace pay site, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, I'm not going to pretend that I'm outraged enough about this that I'm going to boycott Fox/Lucasfilm for all time and eternity. Heck, I've checked the site twice since starting this little diatribe, and I'm still kind of excited to find out what's on the Blu-ray. To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite comedies, My Favorite Year, "With George, you forgive a lot, you know?"
I know.
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