Retromercial of the Day: Day 23



'Tis a commercial for Trico's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace promotion. I don't have to tell you that TPM enjoyed a marketing blitz that was (and forever will be) unequaled in history. Star Wars had never and never will again enjoy such heights.
The fallout was that Trico (a division of Pepsi that owned KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut) had extreme troubles in the fourth quarter of 1999, and I think they sold off KFC.(Not sure about that, but I'm not going to do the research for a crummy blog like this.) There are rumors that there is still a warehouse full of unsold toys that were meant to be sold through this promotion. Not to mention all the other licensees who ceased to exist or that had to spend years getting their stock price back up after dealing with all the unsold merchandise.

I can see why so many licensees lined up to get a piece of the pie. Star Wars fandom was at a fever pitch during the 90s and seemed to increase every year. This new Star Wars movie was like the second coming of Christ. It was a great time to be a Star Wars fan, and sadly enough, one that would not be repeated for the other two prequels. TPM wasn't a great movie by any measure, but it does not deserve all the hate it gets. It's just a movie, something George Lucas himself said more than once in interviews before it opened. In the end, it was a victim of its own hype. No movie, no matter if it's equal in greatness to 'Citizen Kane' could have lived up to that hype.

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