Chewing Pencils

A few weeks ago in this post, I spoke about tapping into the movements in pop-culture as a potential market for cartoons. AT te time, I mentioned that I was working on a Star Wars cartoon that would hopefully coincide with the release of the theatrical version of the original movies on DVD.

As a bit of background, millions of fans have been annoyed with director George Lucas for messing with the orginal movies by adding bits here and taking other bits away there. Lucas swore that he would never release the original movies on DVD, but relented this year and is about to do so. However, the release is a poor quality, un-restored transfer, and it has the Star Wars fans in an uproar. It’s not a big stretch of the imagination to see that George will restore them and re-release them again sometime next year, giving fans yet another version to purchase.

Anyway, the above cartoon was done to try and tap into the negative vibes and give Star Wars fans a bit of a chuckle.

Given that I, and then my son, had a trip to hospital in the last few weeks, I was a little bit behind in my schedule and in the end and wasn’t entirely happy with the results. But with a little bit of promotion on Star Wars and DVD forums around the internet, traffic to my site has gone through the roof. The income I generate from click-through advertising has spiked, and the image is starting to spread through other Star Wars forums and discussion groups.

To try and capitalise on this, I’ve set up some merchandise through Cafe Press and hope that some of the Star Wars fans will buy each other a T-shirt for Christmas! In the next few days, I’ll submit the cartoon to a number of DVD publications around the world, and hope to see some positive results.

The actual DVD doesn’t come out until next week, but to be ranked high in the search engines when it is released, I need to have my cartoon, and the pages it appears on, indexed by the search engines now.

Experiments like this don’t work very often. But when they do, the results can be stunning, so it’s worth giving it some thought and energy if your schedule allows. I’ll keep you updated on the success, or lack thereof, of this Star Wars cartoon experiment and would love to hear of any ideas you have for cracking the pop-culture market.