“ every thing is AWesoMe.” spreAdibilit y And THE LEGO MOVIE
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a firm grip on the franchise and policing its limits so that everything is
not possible. Jenkins’ observations as to how narrative franchises work
through contemporary media companies therefore help to explain the
clever irony behind The LEGO Movie and how it resides in pointing, in
true postmodern, self-conscious fashion, to storyworlds as agglomerated fictional universes, imaginatively extended and developed through
transmedia storytelling.
“Arr, thaar be too many micro-managers!!”
As I have been arguing, The LEGO Movie both exemplifies and autoreflexively
ironizes the various ways in which transmedia storytelling practices seem
to promote creative freedom, while expanding potential markets for their
properties by offering different points of entry for various audience segments. In this case, those market segments include children who play with
LEGO bricks and playsets, and who will enjoy watching their favorite toy
through an alternative media platform, AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO), viewers
familiar with the storyworlds like Batman and Star Wars that the film
incorporates, and so on. At the same time, I would argue, the film makes an
effort to entertain viewers like myself who are skeptical about the industrial
creativity-and-freedom message that the movie potentially communicates,
and this, I believe, is done by means of the kind of self-conscious humor that
I have just outlined. The LEGO Movie, then, is a slick, slyly self-conscious
film, based on an enormously popular toy and the industry that produces
it, as well as the multi-platform economic models that subtend it, featuring
figures such as the neoliberal, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive Lord Business
and his micro-managing henchmen. And what’s wrong with that?
To begin answering this question I refer to Octan, the supposedly fictional
company at the center of The LEGO Movie run by Lord Business, that “make[s]
good stuff: dairy products, TV shows, coffee, surveillance cameras, all history
books, [and] voting machines.” This description, of course, loosely describes
many of the “big ten” multinationals, and enormous, highly diversified corporations like LEGO, so it is not without significance that Octan is lampooned
in the film as a patently evil, despotic corporate dictatorship. Importantly,
moreover, Octan made its first appearance in various LEGO sets beginning in
1992, whereas before 1992, LEGO used the logos of real-world oil companies
Esso, Shell, and Exxon in their boxed playsets. While LEGO dropped the
Esso and Exxon logos sometime thereafter due to negative associations that
consumers might have with these companies, it continued to use the Shell
183
a firm grip on the franchise and policing its limits so that everything is
not possible. Jenkins’ observations as to how narrative franchises work
through contemporary media companies therefore help to explain the
clever irony behind The LEGO Movie and how it resides in pointing, in
true postmodern, self-conscious fashion, to storyworlds as agglomerated fictional universes, imaginatively extended and developed through
transmedia storytelling.
“Arr, thaar be too many micro-managers!!”
As I have been arguing, The LEGO Movie both exemplifies and autoreflexively
ironizes the various ways in which transmedia storytelling practices seem
to promote creative freedom, while expanding potential markets for their
properties by offering different points of entry for various audience segments. In this case, those market segments include children who play with
LEGO bricks and playsets, and who will enjoy watching their favorite toy
through an alternative media platform, AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO), viewers
familiar with the storyworlds like Batman and Star Wars that the film
incorporates, and so on. At the same time, I would argue, the film makes an
effort to entertain viewers like myself who are skeptical about the industrial
creativity-and-freedom message that the movie potentially communicates,
and this, I believe, is done by means of the kind of self-conscious humor that
I have just outlined. The LEGO Movie, then, is a slick, slyly self-conscious
film, based on an enormously popular toy and the industry that produces
it, as well as the multi-platform economic models that subtend it, featuring
figures such as the neoliberal, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive Lord Business
and his micro-managing henchmen. And what’s wrong with that?
To begin answering this question I refer to Octan, the supposedly fictional
company at the center of The LEGO Movie run by Lord Business, that “make[s]
good stuff: dairy products, TV shows, coffee, surveillance cameras, all history
books, [and] voting machines.” This description, of course, loosely describes
many of the “big ten” multinationals, and enormous, highly diversified corporations like LEGO, so it is not without significance that Octan is lampooned
in the film as a patently evil, despotic corporate dictatorship. Importantly,
moreover, Octan made its first appearance in various LEGO sets beginning in
1992, whereas before 1992, LEGO used the logos of real-world oil companies
Esso, Shell, and Exxon in their boxed playsets. While LEGO dropped the
Esso and Exxon logos sometime thereafter due to negative associations that
consumers might have with these companies, it continued to use the Shell