![]() That’s important for transmedia characters – even when transmedia isn’t so narrowly focused around the idea of retelling exactly what came before. Walt Disney’s response to the little girl was that just like there is only one Santa, there is only one Mickey. But character integrity goes deeper than that – character performers also can’t break character, be seen with their costume half-on, or publicly mention they play a character at a Disney park. That’s because there *is* only one Mickey or Ariel or Buzz Lightyear. ![]() That means there can only ever be one version of a character in the park at a time. Nowadays, Disney theme parks have what they call the Rule of One. That’s when a young girl wrote to Walt Disney to ask an innocent question: How many Mickey Mouses were there? She had seen Mickey in so many places, she believed there must be more than one. The concept of character integrity got its start in the 1930s. The challenge, of course, will be that this ascendency of characters will be happening at the same time that the job of nurturing those characters becomes more distributed – with a growing number of production companies, publishers, actors, writers, studios, and technologies involved in creating fan experiences across a variety of mediums for each transmedia franchise. ![]() In the next evolution of media and transmedia entertainment, characters will be even more critical as they become the core drivers of the story worlds at the heart of this new breed of entertainment transmedia companies. Instead, he argues, all these companies are now primarily ‘entertainment companies.’ Their job is to create and tell stories, build love for those stories, and then monetize that love. “It’s clear today that these company definitions are no longer right.” Marvel was a comic book company, Mattel a toy company, ESPN a sports network, etc… Even Walt described Disney as a movie company,” he wrote in a 2021 post about IP and storytelling. “Historically, we defined an entertainment company around its core offering. Transmedia storytelling is, according to Matthew Ball, the author of The Metaverse and How it Will Revolutionize Everything, the “final frontier of storytelling.” Transmedia storytelling: The final frontier Then, in the second post, we’ll explore what character integrity looks like in the transmedia age and what role AI characters could play. In this two part blog series, we’ll first explore how the primacy of characters in transmedia storytelling creates challenges – especially given the increasingly distributed way transmedia properties are produced. It’s the creation of dynamic story ecosystems where each new piece of media tells a different part of the narrative. It’s not just trilogies, remakes, spin-offs, and adaptations growing out of valuable IP and then extending across mediums these days. And movie IP? Well, a popular cinematic universe like Marvel might create a number of TV series that are only tangentially related to their films like WandaVision, Ms. TV shows become in-person immersive events with original storylines, special merchandise, and photo ops like Stranger Things: The Experience. Instead, gaming native IP like Halo and League of Legends evolve into TV series – or even a virtual K-pop girl group. Valuable IP doesn’t just jump from the silver screen to a TV series or video game anymore.
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