Today we learned about nostalgia, marketability and how those can work together. Marketability is the the ability of something to be sold (or marketed if it makes it easier to remember). Movies are a booming industry worth billions of dollars allowing for movies with million dollar budgets. This huge industry and budgets that might seem absurd to the unfamiliar eye means that these movies need to make lots of money. In order for a movie to make lots of money a key part of the movie is marketability. Seeing from series like Stranger Things and the marketing of Thor: Ragnarok the desire for 80's culture is on the rise and showing no hint of stopping. The reason these are so effective and popular is primarily nostalgia. Nostalgia being how one can reflect on the past (usually in a favorable light) can make a product very appealing. Using this knowledge we watched the both Ready Player One trailers (included at the bottom), watching it once to just see it and another to view it as scholars looking for allusions and later discussing how they could be used to pull in different audiences. An example for this could be how the Iron Giant from The Iron Giant appears in the film.
Of course, marketing with nostalgia isn't a method exclusive to the film industry. Notably, the video game industry is guilty of using this, similarly to film, to the point of, in my opinion over saturation. If I had to point to one example it would be both of EA DICE's Star Wars: Battlefront games. As a kid I played the crap out of both Pandemic Studios' and Free Radical's original version of the Star Wars: Battlefront games on the Playstation 2. I played these an unreasonable amount of time by myself and when my friends came over it was often the same, and still sometimes play the PC version with my friends using unofficial servers, so it would suffice to say that these games hold a very dear place in my heart and that I was excited when I heard that there was another was being made. Although words like "reboot" and "EA DICE" made me cautious nostalgia won me over regardless. The marketing as always by big companies was great and played heavily in the hearts of nostalgic people like me. Upon its full release was one of the times I cursed myself out for ever trusting marketing or nostalgia ever. It would almost be an understatement to say it was one of the biggest let downs of my life that I still haven't recovered from. Marketing and nostalgia work well together, but they were my demise in the end.
Late but GREAT! Really wish this had been on time because it’s a dynamite post. Excellent balance of the academic language with the conversational tone. The extension is also important (especially given the recent turmoil over EA’s shenanigans), and stays specific in the ways in which you bring in the outside world
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