90s MOVIES & TELEVISION a CHC2D Canadian History Presentation

THE MOVIES the most notable trend in the nineties when it came to the movies actually began as a result of the end of the eighties Batman had proven so successful that other studios wanted to make movies based on comic books many of those comic book movies did not look to the superhero comics because (a) all of the DC Comics were under license to Warner Bros. and (b) licenses from Marvel tended to fail commercially as a result, we had films based on classic characters from the newspapers like Dick Tracy, The Phantom and The Stranger — as well as kids-friendly comics like Casper The Friendly Ghost, and “alternative” titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Crow after too many failures, it looked like the fad would die out… but then came Men In Black and the start of the Marvel successes, Blade

CO-PRODUCTION when it came to television, one major trend was for networks to share the cost of producing with networks from other countries the idea was that each producer got the rights for that territory for example: Doctor Who got revived in 1996 by the BBC (for Europe) and Fox (for the Americas and Australia) this is important for Canadians because CTV teamed up with CBS to produce Due South filmed in Toronto, Due South was about a Mountie who went to Chicago on the trail of his father’s killer and stayed with the embassy while helping out a Chicago PD for many an American, they believed that all our police officers dressed in their formal reds

NEW NETWORKS television viewing habits shifted dramatically in the nineties with the introduction of home satellite services satellites brought more channels fortunately for the Canadian networks that were starting up, like A (now CTV2), there were new U.S. networks The WB and UPN to provide content beyond whatever CTV and Global didn’t buy network television also changed dramatically when Fox tried running the episodes of Beverly Hills set in the summer period during the summer — which gave teens something to watch

NEW FORMAT Fox also experimented with putting its most popular shows with young people on home video Paramount had already done Star Trek (at $30 per episode) but Fox decided that putting out the six key episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s first season before the start of the second would help bring in new viewers that changed when Hollywood shifted its focus away from VHS to the new DVD DVDs were cheaper to make and could store more in less space, so TV shows began to switch to it with whole seasons rather than select episodes… creating a whole new love for old classics more importantly, DVDs weren’t copyable — while videocassettes were: RadioShack even sold a device that would break the encryption on commercial tapes so you could copy them DVD was a benefit for Canada as well because now the studios didn’t have to make a separate set of tapes with the Quebec French language instead of English… they could just put an extra audio track on the DVD