Gotta start somewhere. As they say.
I just saw the season premiere of Justice League. Something that strikes me is that this series now seems to be geared for the secondary market. I mean. This (hour-long) episode was letterboxed. It had an obviously high budget. The music was notably well-orchestrated. It just has the sheen of a product made for the collector, rather than the normal TV audience.
I take it that the DVDs have been selling well.
This makes me wonder even more how the Teen Titans series will turn out. Further, it’s… making me think a little.
I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve got a kind of a positive feeling here. I think that the DVD format has had a pretty big impact on the whole manner in which passive entertainment media are produced. It’s like the film and TV industries are coming to /know/ that whatever they do, it’ll be for posterity. At least, the more observant are.
So rather than just pump out crud, expecting that it’ll disappear into a landfill somewhere, in a lot of cases we’re starting to see some attention to making a halfway-respectable object that people will want to hang onto. This isn’t necessarily the case with Hollywood, as especially over the last half-decade or so, that whole sector has just become a farce. But — well.
And it’s not only new material. All of this happens to coincide with the massive film restoration effort that’s only recently started to gain a bunch of attention and support — again, over the last half-decade or so. A bunch of older films, that had been mouldering for decades, are being fixed up, polished, documented, and given a respectful rerelease in order to fill the collectors’ demand.
History is being recompiled and recombined with the present, giving everyone the opportunity to see what in many cases simply hasn’t been widely available for a long while.
This also corresponds to the massive downturn in necessary production costs for filmmaking. With all of the digital technology and networking we’ve got now, the indie scene is stronger than it’s ever been. And that’s where all of the action is.
It feels kind of like we’re coming along to the verge of something. I’ll reserve hope that whatever it is, we’ll actually fall over. Money tends to be kind of stupid, that way. But hey, you never know.