The Slow Death Of Long-Running Franchises

I was checking the news sites to see if I could come up with a good article topic for today. Clearly I need more news sites, but sometimes they’re hard to get through. Some have very politically motivated writers, others had way too many ads. I used to have one for Variety but between glitches in the email, the RSS feed not even working, and ruining which celebrity is demasked on this week’s The Masked Singer when I’m a week behind meant I had to drop that one. I keep looking for openings to expand.

One of today’s articles came from Bounding Into Comics, who posted on poor Peter Parker getting hit with the retcon bomb. From what they’re saying, Peter’s history has been altered so that at least at one point another kids kept pulling him towards pranks, robbery, and nudie magazines before he was even a teenager. This is a terrible and unnecessary addition, and I even did an Art Soundoff V-Log about the dangers of the retcon bomb. Retcons have been a big problem, but like with activist writers is only a symptom of a larger problem. I was going to write about that “addition” to Peter’s history until I realized something important.

I don’t care.

I haven’t cared about main universe Spider-Man since even before One More Day due to all the annoying stuff being done to him. There’s a random story I might be interested in, but it’s possible being more DC than Marvel, I like Peter Parker but overall I just haven’t gone through the trouble of grabbing a lot of his adventures. I’ve enjoyed him more on television. Even Iron Man I finally stopped following when Tony Stark became Secretary Of Defense, as that series didn’t seem to know what to do with him. That was long before “woke” meant anything other than no longer being asleep rather than people who clearly went crazy from not getting enough.

And I’m not alone in no longer caring about franchises they like. I’m use to having a version of it I wasn’t into. Voyager and Enterprise were Star Trek shows I never got into while Deep Space Nine wasn’t as interesting as the similarly premised Babylon 5. I dropped out of professional wrestling in the early days of the “attitude era” for the WWF (now WWE for stupid reasons) and WCW lost me before it lost itself. I don’t even watch wrestling anymore, though I have tried the occasional smaller promotion out of curiosity. Star Trek hasn’t gotten me excited in years. I don’t need new Trek when there’s so much old Trek I still haven’t explored or revisited in years. That’s just some of the many things I grew up with that I don’t care for new versions of, and data shows I’m not alone in that.

Always cool to see all the beloved Doctors together. (Capaldi wasn’t introduced yet.)

Doctor Who audience scores get lower and lower every week. Star Wars has not benefited Disney anymore than Marvel has because once Disney acquired them, what was enjoyable about those franchises were lost. DC has had a slower burn as Warner Brothers bought the comic company years ago so they could make more Superman and Batman things, but it’s a longer decline than when they bought Atari and chose during the video game bubble bursting to screw up that company. Now Atari is dead, a nostalgia property they drag out every few years for the Gen Xers who suddenly pine for the easier days. I couldn’t even tell you who owns the brand now. That’s on top of video game franchises dying various lengths of death. The Last Of Us lasted two games while Assassin’s Creed took years to put out a terrible game that is also ticking off Japanese fans, historians, government officials, and gamers around the world who enjoyed the franchise. The first live-action meeting of Superman and Batman went poorly. I could make an article that’s just a list of all the properties whose fans, many of whom were there since they were kids, have dropped off with no replacements not because they “outgrew” something or died off, but because they aren’t the franchises they used to love.

So what happened? Egos.

Yes, the current ideological nonsense isn’t helping, but it only got in because egos are all messed up. The publishers don’t look at comics as the important media. I keep bringing up the pecking order but it’s true. Comics and anything animated from cartoons to video games are looked down upon and the people who work on them think the solution isn’t pushing what comics do best but trying to emulate the “approved” media: television/streaming, movies, and books. Nothing else is that important to modern Hollywood and modern Hollywood controls the big two comic publishers, so the comic publishers try to emulate their bosses favorite children and giving up what makes those media forms so good. Disney pushes back against cartoons, while making animated works was Walt Disney’s whole intent, thus giving us animated remakes that are more like demakes whether they’re “woke” or not.

You can’t blame this all on the activists. Battlestar Galactica wasn’t woke but it did change the entire tone and message of the original. Embracing that and some other “modern takes” before that term went political told the studios that it didn’t matter. Take a script you already have and change a few names, and the studios will accept it without understanding because all they see are brands, not what made them popular. Other directors and showrunners were more interested in their tastes than the audiences.That even happened with the higher ups at Turner networks and whatever Time Warner was called at the time, one of the many reasons WCW no longer exists. They hated wrestling, and they saw the existing issues with the company as a way to get rid of it. (Note that no one factor led to WCW’s downfall and acquisition by WWE. It was a series of blunders and that was just the last nail in the coffin.) I don’t like zombie stories but if I ran A&E I wouldn’t cancel The Walking Dead or even try to scuttle it so long as it made the network money with high ratings I could turn into ad revenue and the creators still had more story to tell. I’d rather it leave on a high note after running out of stories, like Family Ties, than kill something that should have died years ago or still made money but wasn’t to my tastes. I don’t have to watch it. I have to make the investors money.

A lot of the problems with Doctor Who has some blame on activists. Making the Doctor a woman not because someone thought it would make for interesting stories (I haven’t heard of them even really exploring that) or because they wanted to draw people back, but because just being there isn’t enough since you only matter if you have the Name attached to you or some crap was a bad start. The real hurt wasn’t the Trump analog nobody will think about the same distance in the future as we are from “The Happiness Patrol” from the original series, but the retcon bomb of the Timeless Child. Not even that the Child exists. We didn’t NEED a regeneration origin. The Time Lords are smart and jerks, so…nevermind, they’re all dead again. They WERE smart and jerks, so they could invent that along with everything else. It’s not even a bad origin. The problem was that it didn’t need to be the Doctor who was the Timeless Child.

While the culture commentators make note that this makes the first Doctor a young black girl because that’s who came through the portal, we’re not even sure that was her first incarnation. The Fugitive Doctor came after many regenerations were forced on him/her/your guess is as good as mine. (Also, the TARDIS froze as a Police Box in the second episode of the show, long after the Timeless Child would have her own TARDIS, only taking on the form while the Doctor & Susan visited London to hide the Hand Of Omega.) It was yet another attempt to make the Doctor “special”, from “not just another Time Lord” to “the question that should never be answered”. The Doctor wasn’t allowed to be awesome based on current actions but being important to the universe just by existing. That’s lame.

Enjoy it while you can. Someone’s looking to kill this from continuity. Again.

Chris Chibnall wanted to make his mark not by continuing an existing universe he didn’t care about but by altering it and forcing future writers and showrunners to live under the changes he made unless they were egotistical enough to find a way to change it, or cared enough about the franchise to change it back. That’s how you get some alien who is the REAL reason Krypton exploded. It’s how you get Nick Fury Sr. being evil all along or the existence of the Illuminati in the Marvel comics universe, and I didn’t even hate that last one until they decided to play with the Skrulls and lead to the Secret Invasion nonsense. It’s how you get Peter Parker’s marriage erased from continuity, something they’ve tried to find a way to do to Clark and Lois Kent. At least that one was fixed. In a very confusing and stupid way that makes Mxyzptlk the anti-Mephisto, but they did try to have Mxy kill the Supermarriage at one point. DC turned that down, but they still tried to kill it with the New 52…which failed along with everything else about the New 52, but too many of DiDio’s alterations still remain.

Marvel Studios on its own tried to remain true to the comics, one of the few things Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad did right with the Marvel properties, though they only did it because they knew it would help push merchandise. Disney took over, got rid of the oversight board, and now we have producers who don’t want anyone who actually knows the source material working on it, a showrunner who wanted to attack fans for not embracing their poor takes on superheroines because they have an extra X chromosome. That’s not how the X-Men work, I’d joke, but it’s how we get gender swapped heroes and villains, Silver Surfer being the latest (don’t tell me she was in the comics until you read this recent post on how do wiki level research right when it comes to her). Speaking of comics, the Marvel ones have been getting lower sales due to the aforementioned end of the Spider-Marriage via magic continuity erasure, heroes acting less and less heroic, and other issues plaguing the industry that’s an article on it’s own. Meanwhile comics taking on nostalgic properties have changed so much of those properties. Robo Force may not have had a strong backstory but ThunderCats did (so have a lot of other old cartoons Dynamite “updated) and so did Robotech, both of which had adaptations recently that changed a lot of the very nostalgia that made them popular enough TO adapt.

So you have creators who think they can do it better chasing off the fans of those properties and not replacing them, ideology matching or not. You have rights owners and manages who really don’t know why what they have is popular and putting people who don’t care on those properties and are too dumb to realize getting it right would benefit their ability to push their own stories because they hate the source material or love themselves and their tastes and story ideas too much. Throw in the social preachers and the end result is fans going back to the stories they already love or otherwise finding anything that recaptures that magic, with only the brand loyalists and those with a strong personal connection to the franchise to hold on in case they finally get it right again. This is what’s killing franchises that have existed for decades, either as a long-running or a long-remembered part of their childhoods. They loved what was already there, and when that disappears so do they…and their money.