Saturday, February 19, 2011

Alternative Media


This week we are moving away from the conventions of and the how to of the superhero genre and are shifting towards the business side of it. Denison’s article talked about the ways in which Smallville was created and the business strategies that made it successful. He talked about the tweaking of the Superman character to fit within more than just the superhero genre as well as a link to the origin of the character. He also talks about added features online as well as on the DVD the box sets and how that helped the draw in a range of different demographics. When thinking about our adaptation of Birds of Prey into a film or a TV series there are things that we can incorporate into that from this article.
One idea that out adaptation could greatly benefit from would be the concept of the hybrid genre. Denison talks about the mix of mystery, melodrama, soap opera superhero feel that Smallville casts between the spinoff of the Chloe Chronicles and an in-depth look behind the scenes at the characters and those who play them. Although Birds of Prey would generally fall under the superhero genre, playing up certain aspects in the book could help to classify it in a different genre. For starters Birds of Prey is not the average comic where the hero is trying to save the world. These heroes fight on a smaller scale trying to being about justice for individuals. Also they don’t have superpowers. They are trained in various martial arts. Already this sounds less like a superhero films and more like a melodrama. Throw in the dirty politician and this is starting to sound like a crime or detective genre. And something that our group wants to shed more light on than they do in the novel is the love triangle with Oracle Huntress and Nightwing that is a bit of a drama chick flick. If a trailer was drawn up using all of these points it would already start to appeal to a larger demographic.
Something else that was mentioned in the article was having things online for viewers to engage with. There is a scene in the novel where Black Canary is having a flashback to when her mother was Black Canary. She’s going through files she left behind. If something like this was online that let viewers feel like they were part of the action by getting to read some of the other “classified” files it would help to draw in viewers who enjoyed mystery. 

Denison, Rayna. “It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! No, It’s DVD! Superman, Smallville, and the production (of) melodrama.” (Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister, eds.) Film and Comic Books. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2007. P. 160-179

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