For example I recently learned that the beloved cabbage man from avatar the last airbender was originally gonna be on for one episode but the creators learned that fans loved him so he became a recurring character. This was before 2010 and before really any major social media was used by the general public. How would the creators get that type of specific information back then?
In: 0
Aside from raw fan engagement (the number of people cosplaying the character, Internet chatter, fan mail, magazine coverage), there’s also the ‘dial test’.
An audience is invited to watch the show or movie, and they’re given a dial to indicate how much they like what they see. If they like it, they turn the dial one way; if they dislike it, they turn it in the other direction.
Random Fact: some characters have been so wildly unpopular that the viewers turned the dials so hard that the *broke the knobs off.*
A bunch of information really. Besides test audiences and surveys, the most information a bisness can get is how much they sell a product. Reasonably then, you could look at how much two similar products sold and cross reference them to see what was popular about them. If you study 3 or 4 products, you have even more information.
This also doesn’t have to be restricted to just movies. By referencing a lot of books, you could begin to see patterns between well liked books and ones that were not so liked, extrapolate the information, and then reproduce those character traits in a show
Before social media people made forums for different fandoms- sometimes these forums were hosted by the creators of the media, which gave them a live feed of how the fandom reacted to creative developments in the show. In the case of ATLA, the forums actually provided a lot of feedback and even creative suggestions: bloodbending was written into the show after a user of the forums pointed out that waterbenders should be able to manipulate the human body.
Latest Answers