Screw you and your fabled "fault."
No, seriously, I understand the marketing gimmick associated with only making movies available once every N years. However, sometimes this can seriously backfire when it fails to account for events that might increase a specific title's popularity.
Take Tiger Town. Surprisingly, this might be the best baseball movie ever made. I say might, because I haven't seen it since I was young enough probably to have romanticized it too much.
(I was eight when it first aired. I was 13 when Bull Durham came out, 14 for Field of Dreams. Until this very blog post I'd been dead certain in my "memory" of Bull Durham coming out second, as a "drop the sepia tones and understand how life really works" counterpoint.)
Anyway, Tiger Town. "Go get 'em, Detroit Tigers! Go get 'em, Tigers!" Billy Young (Roy Scheider), fading star, only the kid whose mom died still believes in him.
DVD release date: 2004. As you may recall, in real life the 2003 and 2004 Detroit Tigers were very bad.
("Go get 'em, Alan Trammell! Go get 'em, Trammell!")
But in 2006 guess who reached the World Series? What a perfect time for a marketing tie-in, no? Of course, the way I imagine things work at Disney, somebody's great idea from 2006 becomes reality by... 2010?
Mind, they got rather lucky with the timing of the original TV airing: The 1984 Tigers were excellent, and if I remember right the movie was still in rotation.
Shortly after they won the World Series, Lance Parrish et al made a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes, arguably the second-most-memorable moment in that show (most memorable other than "very special" cautionary tales of Gordon Jump as a bike shop owner).
Posted by Matt Bruce at September 1, 2007 12:07 PM