In the early 20th century, there was a con man named George C. Parker who specialized in selling New York landmarks to gullible tourists. He sold Madison Square Garden, Grants Tomb, and the Statue of Liberty. He apparently sold the Brooklyn Bridge numerous times, and lead to that particular con becoming famous. Parker, of course, never had a bridge to sell, nor did he have the Statue of Liberty, but people saw something that they liked and decided they'd be fools to pass up buying something so amazing.
We look back at those people and we wonder how they could have been so gullible, but we still make those mistakes today. People have bought blocks of wood in parking lots because it looked, on a quick glance, to be an iPad at a price that was too good to be true. The stories pop up in the news a few times a year, and we laugh at someones foolishness. But we all make this mistake to a lesser degree all the time. Sure, we're not buying landmarks or wooden iPads, but we still buy things that turn out to be a bit of a fraud all the time. Why, you ask? Because the entertainment industry sells them to us.
Let me start with a small example:
This is the cover to Nightwing issue #29, released this past March. Looking at this cover, we see Nightwing surrounded by his foes. In fact, this cover features almost every, if not every, antagonist that Nightwing has faced since this series launched under the New 52 banner in 2011. You've got the Joker, the Trickster, Saiko, Tony Zucco and many others. The cover also exclaims "Ambushed!".
This cover is clearly selling us a thrilling issue of Nightwing in which all of the adversaries he's faced to date team up and attack him. This sort of ambush isn't new. The dogpile of villains is something that happens to every hero now and again, and it's a great thing to show how on top of their game the hero is. Batman #1 of the New 52 started with Batman in a similar situation.
I would buy this issue, and I'm pretty sure you would too.
But guess what? This cover has absolutely nothing do with this issue.
Sure, the villains featured here sort of show up as Dick Grayson recollects the events that have led him to where he is now, which is appropriate since this is the second to last issue of the series, but they're never on panel together. As such, the proclaimed ambush never happens. This is an issue about introspection, with a small fight between Nightwing and Victor Zsasz near the end.
Now, as a faithful Nightwing reader, this cover caught me by surprise because I knew from the previous issue what this issue was supposed to entail. The fact that it looked like everyone from the series suddenly returned to a final hurrah just seemed strange.
This sort of cover isn't unusual for comic books, but this one is particularly weird. Usually if a cover is a bit of a bait and switch it's because it's misrepresenting something in the comic, but only to a minor degree. Perhaps it shows two heroes fighting, but inside we find out that only one of them is the real character and the other is a shape-shifter (like Clayface or the Chameleon). Sure it's a bit of a white lie, but it's not a complete fabrication. At some point someone who looks like character A is going to fight someone who looks like character B.
Case in point
All-star Western #9. It shows a battle between Jonah Hex and a Talon from the Court of Owls. With the Night of the Owls banner emblazoned on top, you get the impression that this is the major focus of the issue. If you're like me, and you assumed that, you'd be wrong. Sure, Jonah does fight a Talon in this issue, but it's only about 4 pages of the 22 page issue. The rest is wrapping up the previous storyline, and laying the groundwork for the next story.
But, because this confrontation does happen, the cover is only a little white lie told because it's the main action of the issue and makes a great selling point.
The Nightwing cover, however, is just a flat out fabrication. Nothing remotely resembling this cover happens inside the book. Moreover, there's no ambush to speak of. The cover isn't just a little fib, it's a flat out whopper. You're being sold a comic book that no one wrote, and DC comics knew didn't actually exist.
Why? Because dogpile issues probably sell better than introspective issues.
This isn't just comic books, though. Far from it.
That trailer got me extremely excited to see Godzilla, and put me in the theater for the first showing that Thursday.
I was utterly shocked by the movie I actually watched. I'm not going to get into whether Godzilla was good or bad, that's irrelevant to this particular post, but I will say that the movie this trailer is selling is not the movie that's playing in theaters.
Obviously there's going to be some spoilers now, but I'll keep them as general as I can.
In the trailer, the threat is Godzilla. He's awake, he's pissed, and he'd not taking any of humanity's crap. The government appears to be covering up the truth about the giant lizard, and Brian Cranston is trying to get to the bottom of it. Humanity is going to struggle to survive this initial encounter with the King of Monsters, and it looks like it's going to be dark and riveting.
The movie, however, is very, very different. In the film Godzilla is not the antagonist. There are other monsters that fill that role and, though you can't tell from the trailer, they fill the bulk of the movies run time. Similarly, despite Brian Cranston being front and center in the ads, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson being a brief cameo, their roles are absolutely reversed in the final film. Cranston has a rather small role and Taylor-Johnson is the protagonist. On top of this, there's no conspiracy to cover up Godzilla, when the monsters start rampaging it's a well known fact that it's happening.
But every single moment in that trailer is in the film, unlike with the recent Amazing Spider-man 2 where notable trailer moments aren't in the finished film. The editor who cut the trailer cobbled together a completely different story than the one told in the film and the studio has been marketing the editors vision rather than the screenwriter or directors take.
Early numbers indicate that Godzilla took in about $93 million dollars this weekend, making it one of the best openings of 2014. Clearly people responded to the marketing campaign.
I can't help but wonder, though, how many people became confused during the course of the film that it wasn't playing out the way the ads indicated? Not to say that they didn't enjoy the movie they were watching, just to say that the moment hit them somewhere during the two hour run time that they had, to a least a small degree, been lied to.
This is an age old trick. There's no question about that. The question is, why do we continue to fall for people selling us fake things?
We've entered the information age. An age where I can find leaked set photos for Avengers 2 online right now. Want to know what Captain America's new costume looks like? Boom, there it is. Even that's not news. The synopsis for Spider-Man 2 was circling the internet a full year before it hit theaters in 2004. And yet, despite this access to spoilers of all kinds, the people who entertain us, continue to pull the wool over our eyes time and time again.
An equally valid question is, why do publishers and movie studios keep trying to deceive us? It's not that all the things they sell us end up being bad. I liked the aforementioned issue of Nightwing, and the Godzilla reviews have been pretty positive. So, why not just be honest? Is it a lack of confidence in their product? Is the market so competitive that real products no longer catch the eye of the consumer? Or is it simply the desire to be bigger, flashier, more exciting?
As a geek and a fanboy, and therefore someone who gets excited about cool looking movies and books, it's always disheartening to put down $15 bucks for a movie, or $4 or more for a comic book and find out that I've been lied to. I'd rather be told exactly what I'm buying and be allowed to be excited, or not excited, over what I'll actually be paying for.
They always say "don't just a book by it's cover", the problem is that the cover is often the only thing we get to see before we make out purchase. "Let the buyer beware" might be a good saying to live buy. Maybe we should start another saying "Never go to the midnight release unless you know exactly what you're seeing".
P.S.
Studios aren't the only ones who can cobble together an ad for a completely different movie from actual movie footage.
But the difference is that the guy who edited this isn't actually trying to sell us on the movie The Shining.
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