Today’s lunchtime news chum provides three reports on things that are going away. Will you be sad to see them disappear? Share your thoughts.
- From the “Familiar Brand Names” Department: CNN has a gallery of 8 brand names that were killed in 2009. These include familiar names such as Saturn or Pontiac, Circuit City, and Kodachrome, and less familiar names such as Encarta. In some ways, I’m sad to see Pontiac go: at least they kept NUMMI alive, and that helped California.
- From the “You’ve Got a Friend In Me” Department: Disneyland is replacing the Aladdin show with the Toy Story show, according to the LA Times. The Aladdin show was evidnetly great because of the ad-libbing (I haven’t seen it); the Toy Story show is a more static show imported from Disney Cruise Lines. No indications of where Aladdin is going, or whether it might be expanded and moved into Disney Theatricals.
- From the “What a Beautiful Doll” Department: The Ventura County Star, via AP, is reporting how American Girl is phasing out the Kirsten historical doll. Now, my daughter was never into the American Girl characters (although she did read the books early on)… what I find interesting here is the marketing angle: girls losing interest in historical dolls (except for the older girls that grew up with them), and the notion that the dolls were overexposed, and might come back at some time in the future (raising the question of whether Mattel, which owns AG, is learning from Disney… and what other properties might be periodically “retired”).
