phantom train said:
Quote:
"Sorry to upset the cynics, but this DVD release has been at least 10 years in the making, this wasn't synergistic marketing tool cooked up by Lucas to tie in with KOTCS. Back in the mid-nineties, after the cancellation of the show, Lucas specifically mentioned how he saw the show as a teaching tool and planned to release the show along with a series of documentaries highlighting the people and events discussed in certain episodes.
In 1999 we saw the first wave of episodes on VHS released. Unfortunately sales did not warrant the release of the second wave... then came the advent of DVD.
By 2002 Lucas and Rick McCallum specifically talked about releasing Young Indy on DVD, but that they needed time to produce the documentaries which would supplement the discs.
In 2005 at Celebration III Lucas said the following: "We are working very hard on completing the entire series with about 100 documentaries to go along with it, based on the main historical characters found in the series." This was good year before KOTCS had gotten any type of green light.
Sorry but these discs would have eventually seen the light of day, with or without KOTCS. Now obviously Lucas is availing himself the opportunity to release the sets when interest in Indy is at a high, but that's just good business sense."
Sorry, but I'm still skeptical. Granted, Lucas and co. may have been "planning" to release the YIJC on DVD at some point (whether or not a IJ film was coming out), but would these DVD's have actually come out if there were no new Indy film? The show is relatively obscure, and I'm not sure that Lucas would have wanted to gamble on the possibility that the DVD sets would sell very poorly if they hadn't at least had a new Indy film to raise visibility.
Of course, this is just sheer speculation on my part. I guess we'll never know.
Then why is there no trailer for the new movie on the DVDs? That's actually really unusual. It's pretty customary for a new DVD release of extant material to include a promo spot for any forthcoming new release of related material.
The original
Indy movie DVD set included a trailer for a then-new Indy game, and the new movie DVDs similarly include a trailer for the latest Indy game. Similarly, the
Star Wars DVDs all included game trailers for whatever
Star Wars game was just released or imminent at the time those DVDs came out. Switching from Lucasfilm to Paramount, various
Star Trek DVDs include trailers or promo spots for new series, movies or whatever (and one
Trek DVD even included a spot for the first
Indy DVDs (!)). Yet these
Young Indy DVDs' extras do little more than mention the existence of the Indiana Jones movies, and lack anything one would consider a promo spot, even though in this instance it'd be entirely warranted.
And at the same time, the official site, which originally was a fairly full-featured site with info on the entire Indy mythos including
Young Indy, has been transformed into a promotional tool for the marketing of the new movie, and any reference to
Young Indy one could find there at all has been purged.
Here are the long-awaited
Young Indy DVDs, and here's the long-awaited fourth Indy feature film, and rather than do any sort of cross-promotion whatsoever, they're marketing them like unrelated entities. If there
is any attempt to capitalize on the new movie's coattails with the release of the
YIJ DVDs, it's being made
only in the timing (which I don't doubt is the case, actually, but still), and not in the content of any of the advertising or anything like that...