Word: matsushita
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Central Casting could not have supplied a better chorus of worriers than the screenwriters, politicians and just plain citizens who weighed in last week after MCA chairman Wasserman announced that he was selling Universal Pictures and the rest of the MCA entertainment giant to Matsushita Electric Industrial for $6.1 billion. How could he, they asked, sell to foreigners the studio that made To Kill a Mockingbird, Jaws, E.T., Born on the Fourth of July and Back to the Future? The home of TV heroes Magnum, Columbo, Jim Rockford, Sonny Crockett and even the Beaver? The company that runs the lodgings...
Some business strategists were puzzled by the fuss. Overseas investors, after all, already own more than $400 billion worth of U.S. businesses and real estate. And Matsushita doesn't make a very convincing villain. The world's largest consumer electronics firm (fiscal 1990 revenues: $38 billion), it manufactures some of America's favorite brands of video and audio gear: Panasonic, Quasar and Technics...
Some Hollywood insiders as well as political critics are worried that foreign owners might change the fundamental nature of American movies and television shows, subtly shifting their tone and content. Those concerns were heightened last week at the press conference Matsushita president Akio Tanii conducted by satellite video hookup after the deal was announced. In answer to an American reporter's hypothetical question about what Tanii would do if Universal wanted to make a Japan-bashing film or one that criticized the late Emperor Hirohito, Tanii responded ambiguously, "Something like that shouldn't emerge. Filmmakers must create films that...
...Matsushita (pronounced Mat-soosh-ta), the MCA purchase is a way of ensuring an immensely valuable supply of so-called software: the movies, records and films that can be played on the machines Matsushita sells. Says Donald Richie, a leading arts critic and longtime resident of Japan: "There's no reason for a Yellow Peril scare. The Japanese just want to milk the cows and pull in the profits that they know these studios create." Matsushita hopes to put half a century's worth of MCA creative output into new CDs, videotapes, laser discs and other formats. Besides producing movies...
...Matsushita is cautious but forward looking. The company has never had Sony's cosmopolitan polish, yet it was Matsushita's subsidiary JVC that developed the original VHS video technology in 1976. Tanii, then the youthful chief of Matsushita's fledgling VCR division, convinced his superiors that consumers would choose VHS over Sony's Betamax if they could also buy compatible videotaped entertainment...