Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots最新文献

{"title":"Chapter 14. My Generation(s): Cycles, Branding, and Renewal in E4’s Skins","authors":"Faye Woods","doi":"10.7560/309001-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/309001-015","url":null,"abstract":"In an era of fragmenting audience and diversified viewing platforms, youth television needs to move fast and make a lot of noise in order to capture and maintain the attention of the teenage viewer. British ensemble youth drama Skins (E4, 2007-2013) calls attention to itself with its high doses of drugs, chaotic parties and casual attitudes towards sexuality. It also moves quickly, shedding its cast every two seasons as they graduate from school, then renewing itself with a fresh generation of 16 year old characters - three cycles in total. This essay will explore the challenges of maintaining audience connections whilst resetting the narrative clock with each cycle. I suggest that the development of the Skins brand was key to the programme’s success. Branding is particularly important for an audience demographic who increasingly consume their television outside of broadcast flow and essential for a programme which renews its cast every two years. The Skins brand operate as a framework, as the central audience draw, have the strength to maintain audience connections when it ‘graduates’ those characters they identify with at the close of each cycle and starts again from scratch. This essay will explore how the Skins brand constructs a cohesive identity across its multiple generations, yet also consider how the cyclic form poses challenges for the programme’s representations and narratives. \u0000 \u0000This cyclic form allows Skins to repeatedly reach out to a new audience who comes of age alongside each new generation and to reflect shifts in British youth culture. Thus Skins remains ever-youthful, seeking to maintain an at times painfully hip identity. Yet the programme has a somewhat schizophrenic identity, torn between its roots in British realist drama and surrealist comedy and an escapist aspirational glamour that shows the influence of US Teen TV. This combination results in a tendency towards a heightened melodrama at odds with Skins claims for authenticity - its much vaunted teenage advisors and young writers - with the cyclic structure serving to amplify the programme’s excessive tendencies. Each cycle wrestles with a need for continuity and familiarity - partly maintained through brand, aesthetic and setting - yet a desire for freshness and originality, to assert difference from what has gone before. I suggest that the inevitable need for each cycle to ‘top’ what has gone before results in a move away from character-based intimacy and the everyday to high-stakes drama and violence which sits uncomfortably within British youth television.","PeriodicalId":198808,"journal":{"name":"Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129396801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chapter 15. Extended Attractions: Recut Trailers, Film Promotion, and Audience Desire","authors":"K. Williams","doi":"10.7560/309001-016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/309001-016","url":null,"abstract":"The length of a promotional cycle for a film generally begins with the emergence of a poster or a film trailer that attempts to both \"announce wares\" and \"win patrons\" (Staiger 1990, 3). Traditionally, film trailers and posters have been used to draw audiences to the cinematic space to consume a feature film. But as film promotion has increasingly shifted from the spaces of the cinema and television, and from being tied to the event of film going, objects of film promotion can be consumed and enjoyed for their own sake at any point in a film's promotional life. The presence of trailers on DVDs and on the Internet mean that Consumers can watch a trailer well after a film has been released and for purposes other than choosing which upcoming feature to watch. Recut trailers, which are typically uploaded to the video-sharing site YouTube, involve the recutting or splicing together of footage from one or more sources to create a trailer for a film that does not and will not exist. In some instances, footage is shot specifically for the trailer. Recut trailers alter the typical path of film promotion, which seeks to announce a film, build an audience, and draw viewers to the space of the cinema. Famous examples of recut trailers include The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick) recut as a family comedy or footage from Back to the Future (1985, Robert Zemeckis) recut to mimic the narrative of Brokeback Mountain (2006, Ang Lee). Although they take the form of an advertisement, recuts seek to advertise something that cannot be obtained, since a hybrid film such a Brokeback to the Future (Chocolate Cake City 2006) will not eventuate. Recut trailers reflect and embody audience desire to see an existing feature be extended into a sequel, create a cycle of films, or generate multiplicities through a series of links between disparate films. This chapter outlines the numerous ways that recut trailers play with the temporality of a feature film's promotion, as well as how they may shift our understanding of what may constitute filmic multiplicities. Recut trailers allow users and audiences to revisit, rework, and augment their memory of a feature film, identifying latent story lines, shifting the genre of a film, or allowing a character from a film to exist in a newly imagined film. They consequently disrupt the typical longevity of a film, leaving tangible objects of audience desire that can be revisited to keep a film almost timeless, allowing an older feature film to be reinvigorated through any of the aforementioned strategies. I discuss the creation of multiplicities through three case studies in this chapter. First, through an analysis of recuts and originally shot trailers created in the wake of Snakes on a Plane 's release (2006, David R. Ellis), I position the recut trailer as a form through which audiences can mock and subvert attempts by Hollywood studios to create film cycles and multiplicities. Second, I use Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan) to demonstr","PeriodicalId":198808,"journal":{"name":"Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117312445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chapter 3. Descended from Hercules: Masculine Anxiety in the Peplum","authors":"Robert A. Rushing","doi":"10.7560/309001-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/309001-004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":198808,"journal":{"name":"Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125738577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}