Corporate ownership of franchises shifted blockbusters from labor solidarity stories to entrepreneur narratives

Evidence

While the sequel shares the synergy, cross-promotion, and product placement of the original, it is far removed from that film’s narrative and ideology. The villain of the first film is a cartoon alien, intent on kidnapping the Looney Tunes for his amusement park, to which Bugs Bunny responds by convening a meeting at Union Hall 839, a reference to the Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839. Animators in Hollywood have a long history of labor actions, including “the Disney strike” of 1941 and Local 839’s strike over offshoring of animation in 1979. The original Space Jam pays tribute to these workers, as well as the Teamsters, and narrativizes a collective struggle among cartoon creatives, commenting on its own status amid a synergistic merchandising cash-in. … The villain of Space Jam’s sequel, meanwhile, is a new form of content kidnapping—an algorithm named Al-G Rhythm—but a union organizing a labor action is not at all the response the film suggests. Instead, the conflict is mapped onto LeBron’s relationship with his son, a wunderkind who is seen single-handedly developing every aspect of a video game: not just coding, but recording sound effects, composing music, scanning 3D models, and drawing characters. A portrait of the entrepreneurial artist as a young man. There is no collective worker power in the sequel—there aren’t even workers. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 446

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, precise ideological contrast: two films, same franchise, same corporate synergy, yet the villain type and the hero response flip from collective labor action to solitary entrepreneurial genius — an elegant demonstration that ownership structure shapes ideology at the level of what conflicts are even imaginable.
• STORYSTEM: The idea of contrasting two installments of the same franchise as a way to date ideological shifts is a structure for fiction and criticism alike.
• XREF: Strongly supports the book’s Part One-to-Part Two thesis — financial/brand structure visibly leaving fingerprints on narrative form within one franchise. — connects to: The entrepreneur myth persists because it reinforces core American values — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 682