Author-as-Franchise-Product: Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. and Tarzan as Historical Branded Entertainment

Background

Despite the historicised focus of this chapter, considering the role of branding in – and as part of – entertainment might typically lead us to a fairly small amount of academic literature produced during the last decade. Such work encompasses perspectives on marketing, promotion, media production, franchising, transmedia, and indeed branding itself. The very notion of entertainment as branding is embodied in Henry Jenkins’ conception of transmedia, for instance. Consider the media texts emerging from The Matrix film (1999), which Jenkins selects as the exemplar to define transmedia storytelling. This example consists of three films, a collection of shorts called The Animatrix, a comic book series, and a videogame titled Enter the Matrix, all of which contained storyline elements that interwove across the different media texts. In ‘Final Flight of the Osiris,’ one of The Animatrix shorts, for instance, a protagonist called Jue sacrifices herself in order to send a message to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, an event that is referred to in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). In that film, Morpheus and Trinity are rescued by Niobe in the middle of a high-speed freeway chase – a daring rescue that players of the videogame had encountered as a specific mission (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 104-106). As Jenkins elaborates here: