Word: hollywooding
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...should probably copyright that Fort Movie idea because Hollywood, which has made a mint selling toys inspired by its movies for decades, is now selling movies based on toys. And, as if this summer's news that Baby Einstein videos won't necessarily send a newborn to Harvard and toys made in China may cause intestinal damage weren't enough to send parents back to good old teddy bears, it turns out toy movies aren't all that great for kids either...
...movie link, like so many modern Hollywood conventions with unfortunate consequences, can be traced back to the success of Star Wars. Over the last 30 years, Star Wars-linked merchandise has grossed a galactic $9 billion. "What was different about Star Wars was that everything you saw on the screen you could get a toy of," says Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College. In the early 1980s, at the height of Yoda figurine hysteria, the toy and entertainment industries successfully lobbied for the deregulation of children's television, allowing them to base animated TV shows around popular toys...
...overthrown the empire of nice; now the outlaw was in. Later pop stars, like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, didn't sanitize themselves for the mass culture. They knew they were the mass culture, and they did films only as a lark. They had seen what indenture to the old Hollywood dream had done to Elvis: a bunch of B movies that betrayed his revolutionary promise, neutered the sneering sexuality of his early live performances. His top-of-the-charts ballads might have enlarged his audience, but these anodyne musical comedies served to demonstrate his irrelevance in a fickle pop culture...
...That's why modern Elvis fans ignore most of his 31 Hollywood movies, except for the 1957 Jailhouse Rock (with its wild and crazy production number for the title song) and the 1964 Viva Las Vegas (where the feral Ann-Margret compels him to unleash some of the old animal urges). Today his most popular DVD titles are the ones that show him in unbridled action: the documentary This Is Elvis and the concert film Elvis: That's the Way It Is. They also allow the faithful to plunge more deeply into the sacred mystery that is St. Elvis...
...They favored Romney, albeit grudgingly. "I voted for Romney because it's going to take a lot of money to beat the liberals. They've got Hollywood and the unions," said Steve Kruse of Ogden, who seemed unaware that Big Oil, agribusiness and a fair number of major auto dealers support his party of choice. Romney was able to purchase (at $35 per entrance ticket) the votes of Kruse and 4,515 others-and it was the prospect of the former Massachusetts Governor's financial firepower that scared Giuliani, McCain and the spectral Fred Thompson away from the event. Romney...