Curating YouTube: The Use of Promotional Materials in the Remakes of Fame and Footloose
The American film musical has always been an inherently intertextual and self-referential genre for its “recycling” of pre-existing material and its remediation of forms of live entertainment (Feuer, 1993). Contemporary musicals continue in this tradition in a typical postmodern fashion through adaptation, remake practices, and the hybridization of the musical with other film genres. Thus, in the analysis of film musicals and their connections with other texts, the researcher has to take into consideration a wealth of different sources and media, such as novels, live performances, and previous film versions.
Among these, promotional materials like trailers, posters and tie-in music videos are valuable to support the textual analysis and contextualise the films from a socio-historical perspective. In this paper, I will explore how these extra-textual materials can be used in the comparison between two 1980s teen musicals and their recent remakes, Fame (A. Parker, 1980; K. Thancharoen, 2009) and Footloose (H. Ross, 1984; C. Brewer, 2011), highlighting how they contribute to the textual analysis, particularly to a historically informed queer reading of the films.
Moreover, the paper will analyse the role of YouTube and other digital collections online, where these materials can be usually found, in the research of contemporary film musicals and moving images. Not only do these “accidental archives” (Burgess and Green, 2009) attest to the cult status of the films as the users decide what deserves to be part of the cultural heritage, but they also problematically redefine the role of the researcher as curator (Gehl, 2009).