Jason Bainbridge

‘It is a Pokémon world’: The Pokémon franchise and the environment:

Originating in 1996, Pokémon has become the second most successful game-based franchise in the world and arguably one of the best-known examples of transmedia storytelling in youth media today. Based around creator Satoshi Tajiri’s love of insect collecting, Pokémon imagines a world where wild creatures exist to be collected, trained and battle with one another. Such an ideology, simultaneously embracing both the conservation and consumption of nature, is emblematic of the larger challenges Japan has had to negotiate as a nation trying to balance economic development and environmental protection. In this way, this article argues that, when subjected to textual analysis, the Pokémon franchise can function as vernacular theory, interrogating the relationship between environmentalism, materialism and sustainable development, a series of popular youth media texts engaging with issues and subjects that are usually reserved for academia.

Lawyers, Justice and the State: The Sliding Signifier of Law in Popular Culture

This article examines how the concept of ‘law’ is culturally defined through a semiotic analysis of some of the ways in which law is constructed in popular culture. The article goes on to map the changing signifier of law across a number of film and television series, from the heroic lawyer to the embodiment of the ‘state’, the police officer and the government agent. In each case, analysis is provided of how the change in signifier alters the corresponding signified of ‘law’ — and the implications this change has for the pursuit of justice and fidelity to the rule of law. It is suggested that the popular cultural signifier of law has slid further and further away from the modern rule of law towards an increasingly transcendent and interventionist pursuit of justice, pushing the boundaries and promoting debate over what law can and should be.

'And here's the news': analysing the evolution of the marketed newsreader

The newsreader has been a constant fixture of television since its inception but for the most part they have remained elusive objects of study, slipping between journalism studies and celebrity studies. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature by providing a brief historical overview of television newsreading in Australia, together with an analysis of the relationship between newsreaders, gender, celebrity and ratings. In this way we want to put forward a new model for thinking about the relationship between the newsreader and celebrity, as not being antithetical concepts, but rather complementary parts of the marketed newsreaders function: a figure who is as heavily implicated in the marketing and promotion of news as they are in its dissemination.

Madman Entertainment: a case study in 'by fans for fans' media distribution

This article is part of a larger research project looking at the role of Australian media companies in sustaining fan and Australian investment in global popular culture. This article focuses on Madman Entertainment – one of the most successful DVD and merchandise distribution companies in Australia and the leading distributor of anime, with over 90 per cent of the market share. The article explores the ways in which Madman has become a part of the simultaneous globalisation and localisation of Japanese cultural products, and sets out to show how profiling such a company can also provide some insight into the changing role of fans in driving innovation and investment in popular culture.

The Victorian Bushfires and Extreme Weather Events: Media Coverage, Crisis and Communication

The 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ Victorian bushfires claimed the lives of 173 people and have become known as the worst fire event in Australian history. Victoria has been at the centre of two other significant Australian fire disasters – ‘Black Friday’ in 1939 and the 1983 ‘Ash Wednesday’ fires in south-eastern Australia that claimed the lives of 47 people in Victoria. As media scholar and commentator Michael Gawenda has noted, the media not only report an ‘event’ – like the Victorian bushfires or the tsunami in the South Pacific – but in a sense create and define it. Print and electronic media coverage of extreme weather events therefore raises a multitude of issues about the medias role in serving the community before, during and after a crisis, while also trying to produce the best possible reportage in a competitive industry undergoing dramatic change. This issue of MIA provides a venue for critical, empirical engagement with media coverage and representation, and the role of journalism and journalists in reporting national and international bushfires, tsunamis, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, with a special focus on the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Its goal is to address the ramifications of an industry in flux – indeed, some may say crisis – driven by technological advances, staff reductions and media organisations under financial pressure, and to explore the ways in which such extreme weather events have impacted media practices and policy.

‘Murder, Incest and Damn Fine Coffee’: Twin Peaks as new incest narrative 20 years on

Despite the vast amount of critical and academic literature on the television series Twin Peaks, relatively little attention has been paid to its narrative and, more particularly, its treatment of incest. Yet this is where the series remains truly unique, even 20 years later, a popular culture, commercial, network television series that takes incest as its central narrative thread. In analysing the intertextual relationships between media and literature, this article argues that Twin Peaks offers a new narrative of incest, actually advancing our understanding of this issue and contributing new ideas to the body of knowledge on incest. It reveals that incest occurs amongst the white middle-class, in relation to girls on the cusp of adulthood and explores the difficulties involved in giving incest victims a voice. In this way Twin Peaks continually recasts incest, linking it to broader and broader social formations, so incest moves from being a familial issue, to a societal issue, to, ultimately, an issue with modernity itself.

Visual law: the changing signifiers of law in popular visual culture

This chapter uses Saussurean semiotics to explore how law is culturally defined through popular visual media and how these media representations contribute to wider understandings of both law’s functioning and its limitations. It profiles four signifiers of law in popular visual media: the father, the lawyer, the policeman and the vigilante and explores the relationship between them, analysing the impact each of these signifiers has on the corresponding signified of law and their connections to justice and the rule of law. The primary texts I will be looking at are the US television series Law & Order (NBC) and Dexter (Showtime) and the UK series Life on Mars (BBC). Following Bennett and Woollacott’s study (1987, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Methuen) these examples are supported by a deliberately wide-ranging series of secondary media texts, with some slippage between filmic and televisual texts, as any other approach runs the risk of being too limiting, abstracting texts from the wider culture which both elucidates their meaning and demonstrates how widespread these ideas of law truly are.

‘Sexy Men in Wigs’: North Square and the Representation of Law on British Television

North Square (2000) was a television legal drama set in Leeds which aired on Channel 4 for ten weeks from 18 October 2000. During its brief run North Square enjoyed critical acclaim (the Mail on Sunday declaring it ‘the best law series ever made in Britain’) and emergent cult status, and received a number of industry awards including the Broadcasting Press Guild Award 2000 for the Best TV Drama Series and the Best Writer (Peter Moffat). It was seen as both a British answer to American law shows like L.A. Law (1986–94) and the practice (1997–2004) and, more specifically, as Channel 4’s answer to BBC2’s successful series about young lawyers, This Life (1996–7). This article uses North Square as a case study to understand both how British television legal dramas represent the English legal system and what intellectual work they may be performing with regard to this system. Crucial to this analysis is a consideration of some of the difficulties inherent in representing the English common law dramatically and the ways in which a British legal drama like North Square has coped – most notably by displacing dramatic tension away from the courtroom onto domestic, political and ethical tensions. The article provides an outline of the generic characteristics of American legal dramas and then goes on to analyse the ways in which North Square represents the Engish legal system. North Square was taken as the focus of this study because it is both emblematic of trends

From Toyetic to Toyesis: The Cultural Value of Merchandising

This chapter is an attempt to understand the cultural value of toyetics – a media property suitable to be merchandised across a range of licensed tie-ins – by mapping their development through a specific case study, Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy. Merchandising is now regularly used to extend and enrich narratives, to personalise media properties, increase the cultural circulation (or shelf-life) of properties and occasionally even enable them to jump media platforms and survive in entirely new textual environments. Most importantly, toys themselves are increasingly becoming content providers for new screen franchises. I therefore argue that toyetic properties are important forerunners of convergent media and that what we are seeing now is actually better understood as toyesis – where a text’s origins are erased altogether.

'If it's not good TV, believe me, it's not for a jury': Representing the media saturation of law

Using Gillian Flynns 2012 novel Gone Girl as a starting point, this paper explores the nexus between law and media by analysing how three television series about law self-reflexively explore the media saturation of legal practice. CSI, Murder One and Broadchurch each represent what such interrelations with media might mean for legal processes and participants and how these subsequently re-shape the spaces in which law and media are articulated. From this analysis three aspects of media saturation are identified: within the courtroom, outside the courtroom and through the operation of media themselves as jurisprudential texts. The paper concludes with the suggestion that these popular media texts reveal how profoundly the traditionally rigid and contained space of the courtroom can itself be remade into a more liminal, fluid and heterotopic space through media saturation.