Hills - Doctor Who: the unfolding event - marketing, merchandising and mediatizing a brand anniversary

Doctor Who:The Unfolding Event

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Doctor Who:The Unfolding Event Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary

Matt Hills

Aberystwyth University, UK

Matt Hills 2015

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First published 2015 by

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ISBN: 9781137463326 EPUB

ISBN: 9781137463326 PDF

ISBN: 9781137463319 hardback

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www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326

With much love to Emma, who sometimes watches Doctor Who but prefers The X Factor

Contents

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my colleagues at Aberystwyth University who have been helpful since my move there, especially Glen Creeber, Beck Edwards, Kate Egan, Anwen Jones, Steph Jones, Ceris Medhurst-Jones, Jamie Medhurst, Lisa Richards, Sarah Thomas and Kath Williams. Thanks also to everyone who has shared Doctor Who-related things with me, including assorted 50th-anniversary events: Kim Akass, Gaz Bailey, Piers Britton, Gregor Cameron, James Chapman, Ross Garner, Catherine Johnson, Matthew Kilburn, Danny Nicol and Harry Ward. Much appreciation has to go to Dan Hassler-Forest for all his work on our co-edited Transmedia book series at Amsterdam University Press. I would also like to say a big thank you to all my PhD students past and present, at Cardiff and Aberystwyth who have been (and continue to be) such a pleasure to work with.

In relation to the book youre now looking at, Palgrave Macmillan has been unfailingly patient and supportive; my thanks there go to Sneha Kamat Bhavnani, Chris Penfold and Felicity Plester. Also, many thanks to Paul Booth for his valuable feedback on the manuscript, and to Jon Gray for providing such a lovely (para-)paratextual endorsement.

Beyond the many worlds of academia and Doctor Who, thanks as ever are due to Mum, Dad, Stuart, Teresa, Eleanor, Paul, Helen and Amy. And my heartfelt thanks go to Emma and Noodles the cat for all the wonderful times weve spent together, with many more hopefully to come.

Introduction: Media Anniversaries Brand, Paratext, Event ... and the Hype of the Doctor

Abstract:Given the rise in media/brand anniversaries, I consider Doctor Whos 50th in 2013 as a case study. Such anniversaries could be dismissed as pseudo-events, but we should not devalue them as mere hype. Instead, I deploy a paratextual approach, developed to become more phenomenological. Rather than focusing on paratexttext relations, the media/brand anniversary raises questions of inter-paratextual, para-paratextual and meta-paratexual relationships of meaning. I also address how media/cultural studies and philosophical approaches to media events may be useful, arguing that previous work has overly emphasized the ritual centrality (and national unification) of media events. I conclude that a rigorously paratextual take on anniversaries as unfolding events is required. This Introduction thus develops, and contests, theorizations emerging from the paratextual cohort in screen studies.

Keywords: anniversary; brand; Doctor Who; media event; meta-paratext

Hills, Matt. Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0003.