Media tie-ins and their place in the canon

On a mailing list I’m on, a former editor of media tie-in books wrote (and I’m paraphrasing to remove examples):

I used to PO fans all the time when I said that not only is the filmed material the only material that is canon, that’s the way is should be.

So of course the books follow behind.

This, to my mind, is complete and utter garbage.

Why? Because the books are touted as official tie-ins and that small percentage of the audience that buys the books spends far more money than the casual viewer. If you wonder why fans feel such a proprietary interest in the object of their worship, one reason is because he gives them much more money than the average consumer.

Take Star Wars. If you bought “The New Jedi Order” series new and complete, you spent approximately $250. If George decides, “Hey, remember when we killed Chewbacca? Didn’t happen. Psych!” –well, you’d be pissed. And rightly so.

George Lucas, at least, doesn’t exempt his own work from this– he’ll change his own stuff years later. (Han shot first!) But it irks when done from top down, without reciprocity, because there’s a strong aversion to “not invented here”. Sadly, this is something that’s seen more and more. If you follow some media tie-in franchises, you can easily spend a week’s paycheck a year on books. To say that this is not canon is insulting. When I write the stuff, I take care to make sure that it is canonical, that it fits with everything that has gone before.

If the stuff is good enough to take a fan’s money, it should be good enough to count as legitimate. When you sell products that say “the continuing adventures of X”, “a prologue to Y”, or “what happened between Episodes 9 and 10”, I don’t think it’s that unreasonable that they actually BE those things. As it is, this is a marketing strategy that takes your most loyal fan base and uses them like a drug dealer uses his clients– and then cuts the smack with baking soda or rat poison, figuring they’ll never notice the difference and if they do, it’s not like they can go somewhere else, is it?

Not only is this rude, not only is this deceptive, it’s horrible marketing. Ticking off your most loyal fan base, the evangelists who keep your brand alive when others were willing to write it off as a failure and turn it into a billion-dollar powerhouse, shows a contempt and stupidity that I can’t even fathom. Most brand managers KILL for that kind of user loyalty.

And it’s not like it can’t be done. All the MATRIX tie-in stuff is kept in continuity, from video games to comic books. J.K. Rowling controls the Harry Potter brand. After a bad start, Babylon 5 figured it out. And there are brands that not only work closely with the licensee, but actually adapt what the licensee does and incorporates it into the main brand– Star Wars and DC Comics lead the field in these areas. Did you know Kryptonite came from the Superman radio show?

But it requires devotion to the brand, not one section of it. And when done properly, it enhances the brand, and all the licensees involved.

Let me use a metaphor here.

Let’s say that Major League Baseball decides to start up an additional premium digital channel with ESPN for showing Major League Baseball games. At the end of the season, it’s announced that none of the games that aired on ESPN-MLB count for league standings– and furthermore, because those games don’t count, the Yankees are now league champions instead of the Blue Jays.

Is it okay to do so because customers were willing to spend money on it, but only 2% of the viewing populace of a whole? Or should baseball fans be upset because these games were sanctioned by MLB, but now aren’t because we didn’t like the way they were going and New York is a bigger market than Toronto?

No. And in fact, MLB this year started doing the exact opposite: they took the All-Star Game, a game outside league standings– outside continuity, if you will– and said that the league that won the game would get home field advantage in the World Series. Result? Ratings for the All-Star Game went up 30%. People cared again, because it had been brought into the larger fold.

The difference is that they cared about the brand as a whole, rather than one particular part of the family. And as we all know, when you favor one family member over another too much, a lot of bad blood builds up.

(Updated to extend remarks and remove unnecessary attacks, after the recommendation of a more cool-headed individual. The replies I’ve gotten, both pro and con, have been fascinating.)