RichardLess wrote: ↑September 28th, 2020, 1:29 amWhen “Return of the Jedi” came out in 1983, Star Wars was out of focus for the majority of the population. But Lucasfilm still released books and video games & made millions of new fans in the process.
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RichardLess wrote: ↑September 28th, 2020, 1:29 amSony could’ve been stoking the embers by releasing books, video games, a new cartoon series every so often. That’s pretty basic stuff. Sony had zero presence at any cons until recently. How about a major theatrical re-release in 1999 or 2004? What about a straight to DVD animated film like WB had with Batman The Animated Series?
The thing is...they did a lot of this stuff! This started because you were talking about "Extreme Ghostbusters," so they tried a new TV series and it wasn't successful, and the "Batman: Animated Series" movies that were released were off the success of the animated series, so there was still an impetus for the studio to fund those films. I'm pretty sure I saw
Ghostbusters in theaters in 2009, which marked the same 25th anniversary milestone that Universal chose for
Back to the Future. I don't recall an
ET re-release on the 25th anniversary, because they chose the 20th anniversary. I don't think most convention presences are generally funded by the studio. if you mean the cast, then that's up to the cast, and if you mean fan groups that generally seems to be up to the fan groups. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's not like the 501st Legion gets paid by Lucasfilm to go to conventions...
RichardLess wrote: ↑September 28th, 2020, 1:29 amAnd the problem is, it’s not just Ghostbusters. It’s Men in Black.
They did actually do books for
Men in Black, so that's one thing they did in addition. There was an animated series that seemed popular, there were toys for the animated series -- again, they actually seem to have basically done the things you're accusing them of not having done.
As for your argument about
Ghostbusters on home video:
Since the beginning of the DVD era, Sony has put out ten editions of
Ghostbusters, and six editions of
Ghostbusters II (several of which are releases that contain both movies). Again, you might have your personal nitpicks with those editions, but I don't think that's the same as Sony not doing right by the movies, and if we're talking about keeping the IP alive in the view of the public, I've never heard anyone say, "that great special edition really reminded me that that property existed," nor do I think the things that they've put out were incapable of accomplishing that, if there were people who felt that way. The first DVD was a packed special edition that has one of the largest compilations of content from the DVD era, they added some more stuff the first time it came to Blu-ray, they remastered it in 4K and put it out on both Blu-ray and 4K and added more stuff, and the second time it came out on 4K they found even more material. It's certainly fair to say it took a long time to get a special edition of
Ghostbusters II, but it's also fair to say that that is not nearly as popular of a movie than the original, and that the treatment that it got is not unusual for comedy sequels with similar reputations.
I will admit, I am surprised that there is no standard, mass-market complete series DVD of "The Real Ghostbusters," but it is also common for popular animated television shows from the 1980s to be sub-licensed to other labels, so the fact that they handed it off to Time-Life is, again, not particularly surprising. I also think it's unusual to hold the fact that they sublicensed it to Time-Life against them when that was a beautiful set that looked great and had a lot of effort put into it. When companies license out movies for special editions through Shout! Factory and Arrow, I don't hear fans of those movies complaining.