Richard Marshall (http://www.richard-marshall.com/wordpress/) made an interesting observation on twitter (and that's something unusual in itself); that the UK got the new Doctor Who on the same day as the US got the iPad, and that we got the better deal. I agree, and I think it's quite important why. In the 1980s Disney spent a lot of time and wasted an awful lot of money buying distribution channels because they thought they needed channels to get their product to market. They didn't; they needed great stories, great content, and they finally figured this out and bought Pixar. Any distribution channel worth its salt must beg to carry Pixar movies. So to return to the original observation, the new Doctor Who is the content, the iPad is just a distribution channel. The fact is, the new Doctor Who is much, much better than the stuff from 30+ years ago that I watched as a kid. Not just the production values, but more fundamentally the intelligence and inventiveness of the script and the characters. And thinking back to the books I had to read in those days, and comparing them to what is available to my children now, makes me rather jealous. So in the next few days I'll be off with the kids to see the film of the fabulous How To Train Your Dragon (http://www.howtotrainyourdragonbooks.com/), a series of wonderful stories told in that terribly old-fashioned and linear printed book form. The story transcends the medium. Which isn't to say that the delivery mechanism is entirely incidental. A good one extends the possibilities for telling the story, and in our reflexive and self-referential world it can easily become a story in its own right. But it is not the story.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment