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Results tagged “consumption”
Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform principles, with a cult following in academic economics) in the 1920s, and its ultimate pro-capitalist version, authorized for a pittance by the unworldly original patent holder, in the 1930s. (The developer of that successful revision, or rather inversion, had to market a home-made prototype to convince them.) But if the game had flopped, there would have been many plausible reasons -- too complicated, consumers were sick of monopolies, etc.
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
. . . [B]ecause the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."It's encouraging to note that budget limits helped make the song such a success.Mizzy was challenged to become a one-man band and chorus, rose to the task, and managed to include copyright ownership in his contract. Mizzy not only had the right idea, he was willing to put hours of work into the right execution.
In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."
For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.
"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble and Colgate have responded vigorously to consumers' new thrifty avoidance of higher-priced premium brands -- by raising prices of flagship products like Tide detergent even more.
We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky even wrote a column with the ferocious headline "Punish Savers and Make Them Spend Money" -- and a Harvard counterpart, N. Gregory Mankiw, has recently made similar suggestions. (Mr. Kaletsky also proclaimed in April 2008 that if the Democrats were self-destructive enough to nominate him, "Obama would lose to McCain" in a "Greek tragedy" of "ineluctable doom.")
The paradox of thrift may have originated with John Maynard Keynes, but extreme saving, like the hypermiling that began even before the crisis, is an American specialty. In fact, extreme behavior of all kinds is both our glory and our potential downfall. As W. J. Rorabaugh wrote in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, we were the biggest drinkers on earth in the early nineteenth century, when distilled spirits were one of the few ways to move Western grain economically to Eastern markets before the railroads. Yet a hundred years after the whiskey boom, the Prohibition movement was gathering force and by 1919 had secured the Eighteenth Amendment. Americans got drunk together in communal bouts in the young Republic, so they had to sober up together in its maturity. We are the opposite of the ancient Greeks, with their motto "Nothing in Excess" inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
The historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, found Americans turning to "therapeutic simplicity" well before the banking crisis. But in the end, even Amish communities increasingly depend on sales of craft and industrial products -- consumption -- to maintain their way of life. So we should also keep in mind the wisdom of one of our own oracles, Mae West: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky even wrote a column with the ferocious headline "Punish Savers and Make Them Spend Money" -- and a Harvard counterpart, N. Gregory Mankiw, has recently made similar suggestions. (Mr. Kaletsky also proclaimed in April 2008 that if the Democrats were self-destructive enough to nominate him, "Obama would lose to McCain" in a "Greek tragedy" of "ineluctable doom.")
The paradox of thrift may have originated with John Maynard Keynes, but extreme saving, like the hypermiling that began even before the crisis, is an American specialty. In fact, extreme behavior of all kinds is both our glory and our potential downfall. As W. J. Rorabaugh wrote in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, we were the biggest drinkers on earth in the early nineteenth century, when distilled spirits were one of the few ways to move Western grain economically to Eastern markets before the railroads. Yet a hundred years after the whiskey boom, the Prohibition movement was gathering force and by 1919 had secured the Eighteenth Amendment. Americans got drunk together in communal bouts in the young Republic, so they had to sober up together in its maturity. We are the opposite of the ancient Greeks, with their motto "Nothing in Excess" inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
The historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, found Americans turning to "therapeutic simplicity" well before the banking crisis. But in the end, even Amish communities increasingly depend on sales of craft and industrial products -- consumption -- to maintain their way of life. So we should also keep in mind the wisdom of one of our own oracles, Mae West: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
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Edward Tenner
