if i only knew...

Harry Potter saturation

There's a good article on the Guardian site about the negative side-effects of the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon.

Yesterday while browsing for books on amazon.com i noticed their "harry potter meter" on the right sidebar. It displayed the running number of copies of the 5th book sold on amazon.com. I refreshed the page a couple of times in an hour and it just climbed, and climbed and climbed. Last time i looked it stood at 812000 something. And that's just amazon.com. Amazing. (Today the meter is gone, maybe they got into some legal disputes on it.)

The Guardian article quotes Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who swam against the flow and did not sell his soul to marketing managers. He retained the right to his characters and thereby saved C&H for eternity, as two silly cartoon characters with unbeleivable wisdom about life, funny cynism, and an appreciation for the little things that count in life. He says:
"Worse, hype like this sows the seeds of its own creative destruction. Bill Watterson, a famous American cartoonist, fought against merchandising for years. 'When cartoon characters appear on countless products,' he used to argue, 'the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it.' "

I can't help but feel this for Garfield and Snoopy. The characters are on everything from mugs to glow-in-the-dark pillowcases, and became just another famous character that decorates store shelfs. When you see Garfield stuff in stores, you don't think of the real beauty of the comic strip. You think of the cute character. And you don't buy the mug or the 157th decorated pencil because there's no point in buying it - not counting hardcore collectors of course. So in the end Garfield becomes just another pointless product on the shelf that lost its real, original and unquestionable value in the race to create a value in the marketing sense. The original Garfield - the fat, funny, lazy cat with a personality - gets buried somewhere, and its real value is now a thing of the past, nostalgia even. Same with Snoopy. They get reduced to a decorative item. To the level of Hello Kitty merchandise, being there for the cuteness factor, nothing else.

Now, back to the Harry Potter marketing phenomenon, the same thing happens to *the book*. If you got hooked on the HP books when the first one came out, was enchanted by the story and the world of HP - you're lucky. Because then you can appreciate the real value in the book. If you arrived to the world of HP after the hype got out of control, there's a chance that you become grinded up by the Harry Potter machine, and get alienated from the book and the world of HP, left with the feeling of redundancy and annoyance seeing the 400th harry potter special on TV, reading the 500th article in the press and seeing the 674th shopwindow dedicated to the little wizzard. And in the end, the real loser are the kids - robbed of a great childrens' book that had the potential to really open the world of reading to them. The thing with getting lost in a book is that everybody has their own Harry Potter in their personal movie theater. And by making Harry Potter so standardised and so ubiquitous, people are robbed of this image too. Your Harry Potter gets dimmer and dimmer, and gets replaced by the corporate version.

And it doesn't stop here. The Guardian article talks about the effect on childrens' books that get neglected and tossed into the storage room because of Harry Potter taking over childrens' markets everywhere. About the effect on small bookstores who lose out because of the book sold in unbeleivable quantities - and so large discounts - at superstores. And the questionable size of the book: 766 pages for a children's book?

For an ending, i'll quote the article again because this couldn't have been said any better:
"J.K. - an intelligent woman - had choices, despite the pressures. She could have insisted on less marketing, less security and less hype. And just as she didn't have to do it this way, nor do we. So this weekend, if your child asks for Harry Potter, take him or her to the bookshop and try and find something just as good that isn't the centre of a multi-million pound industry. Let's desaturate ourselves."