Creating new brands from old favorites for '97 and beyond - Retailing & Entertainment

Discount Store News, Nov 18, 1996 by Robert Scally

The entertainment business is turning yesterday's hit films and classic books into new lines of branded merchandise that are destined for mass market distribution during the Christmas season and into 1997.

From a pick of products associated with Walt Disney Co.'s "101 Dalmatians" to PBS' literary pup Wishbone to the debut of "White Christmas" branded merchandise due in late '97 from Viacom Consumer Products, Hollywood studios are turning older hit films, television shows and books into new product lines for discount stores and mass merchant outlets.

Developing licensed merchandise from entertainment properties is not new. The Walt Disney Co. began to license products emblazoned with Mickey Mouse in the early 1930s.

What is new is the magnitude of licensing and the degree that Hollywood studios have gone to mine their catalogs of movies and television shows to create new brands that reach far beyond movie theaters and discount store video departments. Interviews with executives at several major studios reveal that the trend toward the branding of entertainment properties will accelerate during the next year.

One of the prime examples of how studios are turning hits from the past into product line gold mines is Disney's live-action version of "101 Dalmatians" starring Glenn Close and Jeff Daniels, which will premiere in cinemas nationwide on Nov. 22.

"101 Dalmatians" will hit theaters and mass merchant with equal force, with dozen of products ranging from apparel to tableware to a special Cruella De Vil doll from Mattel and an Escape From De Vil Manor CD-ROM video game from Disney Interactive. Disney Consumer Products executives hit the road two months ago in the company's new custom-built tractor trailer showroom to sell the 101 Dalmatians brand to mass merchant buyers.

"It's easy for a company to go back and mine a sure thing, especially with the marketing dollars that it takes these days to launch something properly," said Jim Wilson, director of marketing at Philips Media and a former Disney Consumer Products executive.

Complete lines of products revolving around entertainment titles of all kinds are an increasingly important factor for the profitability of a given entertainment property.

But care must be taken when licensing an entertainment property such as a movie.

"The success of merchandising is proportional to the success of a film," Wilson said.

In the case of interactive software, Wilson said that Philips Media won't even consider turning a new entertainment property into multimedia CD-ROM titles unless it already has a proven track record in the market, has the capacity for built-in follow-up titles and has international appeal.

While Philips is developing an entire line of "Sesame Street" titles for the Children's Television Workshop, the producer of the popular public TV show, it is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward CTW's new "Big Bag" television show that recently premiered on The Cartoon Network. Wilson said.

One of the most dramatic comebacks from the archives took place in August 1995 with the re-release on home video of all three "Star Wars" films by FoxVideo. More than 22 million units of the "Star Wars Trilogy" were sold domestically during the recent video release, proving the amazing resilience of the Star Wars brand two decades after the first film's original release, said Robert DeLellis, president of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment .

"That was just on that August campaign," DeLellis said. "It's something that can be done with a catalog item that in this business can never be surpassed."

Driven by the renewed popularity of the movies on home video, sales of Star Wars licensed merchandise took off. The idea of branded lines has also caught on in video sales at studios with deep libraries of TV shows and films, such as Fox and Columbia TriStar.

The re-issue and subsequent repackaging of "Star Wars" came on the heels of FoxVideo's experiments with a branded line of family films, which was a combination of new and classic films plucked from the library,

We brought back a whole franchise, be it toys or books, what have you," DeLellis said.

It's a huge, huge phenomenon. I don't think that anything like it will happen again."

Although reviving "Star Wars" was a big accomplishment, the brand-conscious marketing was taking hold at Fox before the Jedi returned. DeLellis said.

"It goes way beyond Wars' actually," DeLellis said. Several years ago, Fox executives "looked at the overall catalog and dissected it, and the first thing we came up with was the Twentieth Century Fox Family Feature line."

FoxVideo kicked off the new line by re-issuing a number of classic Shirley Temple films on video. This helped to market the catalog title by streeting it the same day in 1994 that the studio released "Mrs. Doubtfire," starring Robin Williams, to sellthrough video. The studio found that there was element of branding that was possible with its family films and issued new releases such as "Pagemaster" and the remake of "Miracle on 34th Street."