Eating Fellini

These patterns of transmedia intertextuality and commodified masquerade are clearly demonstrated on two CBS shows (which were broadcast back to back on Saturday morning, October 14): "The California Raisins" and "Garfield and Friends." Amazingly, both shows included a cartoon character who not only parodied Federico Fellini as the symbol of film culture on the wane, but also boasted a name that evoked a desirable edible (Rasperini and Fettucini). In both instances, too, the nonhuman protagonists were at first highly respectful of this auteur, yet ultimately sought to assimilate him and his cinematic model into their own brand of stardom, demonstrating the superior versatility and consumptive power of both themselves and their medium, TV animation.

In the segment of "Garfield and Friends," the lasagnaloving feline is "discovered" by an egomaniacal Italian film director named Federico Fettucini (to the accompaniment of

music from the soundtrack of 8 1/2 ). Garfield is cast (and dressed) not in the starring role that he imagines (in a fantasy sequence evocative of the auteurist imaginary that is the source of creativity in 8 1/2 ), but in the anonymous role of stunt double, which enables him to assume multiple identities yet undermines the pride he takes in his own uniqueness. To get revenge, Garfield changes the script and usurps the role of director, recasting himself as auteur. This resolution demonstrates that in television the magnetic aura belongs not to the writer or director, whose name is rarely known, but to a character like Garfield (or Bill Cosby), who functions as a commercial nexus around which a whole array of products can be marketed.

Such commercial systems of intertextuality are easily extended outside the home to urban space, where stuffed Garfields and other animal icons cling to car windows and where birthday parties are increasingly designed around a popular media personality like Garfield, whose image is reproduced in the celebrity guest, birthday cake, party favors, and loot bags. These birthdays can later be read diachronically (particularly when documented on home video), both in terms of the child's developmental chain of transformative masquerades and as a minihistory of pop culture. These systems have also appropriated an ever-proliferating stream of banal products like lunch boxes, which were recently featured in a television exhibit at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., tracing the fickle rise and fall of popular TV stars and genres (from western hero Wild Bill Hickcock in 1955 to sci-fi ThunderCats in 1986) while demonstrating some stability in rapidly changing social formations like the family, school, and consumption. According to Standard and Poor's Industry Survey of toys for 1989:

The most successful marketing strategy during the 1980s was the use of storylines and animated television programs to promote new products, which increased consumers' brand awareness. . . . Companies have also succeeded in boosting both brand awareness and sales by licensing their products' logos and likenesses, which now appear on everything from briefs to lunchboxes. Product proliferation has also helped. By offering a broad line of related products and accessories, as opposed to only a few toys based on a product concept, companies have also been able to increase the sales of popular toys by encouraging what the industry calls "collectability."^[21]

In the "California Raisins" episode, an Italian producer-director named Federico Rasperini (who mimics other Italian filmmakers besides Fellini, such as Sergio Leone and Carlo Ponti) wants to direct a rock video starring the Raisins (who, incidentally, rose to TV stardom from commercials), but he does not know how to work in this new medium. Feeling sorry for him because he has invested his own money in the project and because they (erroneously) assume he is broke, the good-hearted Raisins accept his offer. Although they all agree on the Motown classic "Stop, in the Name of Love," Rasperini (in his quest for an ever more lavish cinematic spectacle) keeps changing the genre (from western, to swashbuckler, to circus show, to horror film, and so forth), and consequently the mise-en-scène and costumes keep changing as well. Their video is also sabotaged by the Raisins' rival, Lick Broccoli, a British heavy-metal singer who wants to replace them as star and change the style of the music. As a result, Rasperini's video is not ready for the premiere. The Raisins come to his rescue, deciding to let their "live" performance (in direct address) control the clip and to incorporate the previous filmed versions as inserts,

thus utilizing the visual modulation, fast editing, and pastiche structure characteristic of the music video genre. This solution also realizes one of the dreams of that ultimate postmodernist filmmaker, Raul Ruiz: "You can have many films inside of one. It's one of my dreams to make a film that begins in the time of Ivanhoe and would end as a western. The story would not change, the actors would not change. Only the film would change. That would be fantastic."^[22]

This program trains junior spectators how to distinguish, combine, and consume different genres in both media, for as Fiske insists, "Genre is a means of constructing both the audience and the reading subject."^[23] Dore perceptively observes, "The learning of genre requires more repetitions and routine productions, indeed even ritualizations, of varieties of talk in context than does grammatical thinking,"^[24] and this is precisely what this episode of "The California Raisins" provides. But beyond this cognitive function, the program also leads kiddie spectators to prefer video (with its live broadcasting, direct address, instantaneous electronic editing, and heavy reliance on computer animation) over film. It suggests historical reasons why international auteurs like Fellini have chosen to direct music videos and why they were not entirely successful. It presents a discourse on ethnicity, linking Italians with European elitist high modernism and black Americans with postmodernist pop culture. As Fiske argues:

Highbrow, elitist works of art are typically valued for their unique qualities. . . . Understanding works of art generically, however, locates their value in what they have in common, for their shared conventions form links not only with other texts in the genre, but also between text and audiences, text and producers, and producers and audiences. Generic conventions are so important in television because they are a prime way of both understand-

ing and constructing this triangular relationship between producer, text, and audience.^[25]