In A Perfect World

Go, Betty White, Go!

 

Add me to the list of people amused and excited by the idea of Betty White as the host of Saturday Night Live. We've seen more than enough young and fresh hosts one shy of an acting lesson: Why not a cheerfully spunky 88-year-old who just last month got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild (handed out by Sandra Bullock), has collected a gaggle of Emmies and became a TV Hall of Famer 15 years ago? 

She's best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls,beloved if not exactly hipster classics from the '70s and '80s. But with each passing year, there's something increasingly compelling about the ever-wholesome Betty White. The lady's got verve. 

I mean, how many other thespians, two years shy of 90, are gaining in street cred? No wonder advertisers at BBDO gave her a starring role (and a seriously funny butt-kicking) in their Snickers Super Bowl ad -- and more than 225,000 people have already signed the "Betty White to Host SNL (please)!" petition on Facebook. 

Now it's SNL producer Lorne Michaels' turn. 

Shedding Light on The Art of The Idea

Often the strongest ideas are the simplest ones. John Hunt, author of an insightful new book called The Art of The Idea, describes two categories of people: sunrisers and sunsetters. "A sunriser gives out energy, a sunsetter sucks it away," he writes. "A sunriser goes through life open to the idea that the best may still be coming. A sunset person is heavy in the knowledge that the best is past."

Guess which kind of person suffocates creativity and which is best in a brainstorm session determined to spur fresh ideas and creative breakthroughs.

Hunt, a South African and worldwide creative director of the advertising agency TBWA, says that age has nothing to do with which category anyone falls into. In fact, Hunt, who was intimately involved in Nelson Mandela's election campaign in 1993, describes South Africa's extraordinary leader as "the most sunrise person I've ever met...Often in meetings, he'd listen to people angry about the past. When they were finished, he's agree with them. They were right, he'd say. Then he'd ask that their anger at the past not contaminate the future...Mandela knew that if he based his ideas on the evils of the past, he'd soon have a sunset country."

Hunt's short book -- filled with pithy, well-written observations and charming artwork from South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa -- aims to give room  for ideas to breathe, be it in a jam-packed meeting or alone on an airplane. It's based on his experience that original thinking really can happen in a group and that the power of an idea is not based on who owns it but how it's shared.

That's a view worth exploring. You can see an interview with Hunt on an interesting blog -- mad-blog.com-- created by TBWA to "celebrate media arts and disruption."

Mickey Mouse: Welcome to the Dark Side

Get ready for Mickey's dark side. Mickey Mouse, the nicest mouse on the planet, is about to get real. Turns out the Disney folks have finally recognized that their too-tight cling to their super-clean icon has been killing the little fella. They're planning to awaken his less savory qualities, allow him to be cantankerous and edgy now and then, maybe even make us care about him again.

That's brave for a brand that generates billions in merchandise sales. And smart, because this world-famous icon has become an increasingly irrelevant pop culture figure. Once it's all about nostalgia, it's game over.

According to The New York Times, it's starting with a new video game called Disney Epic Mickey in which Mickey "traverses a forbidden wasteland." And that's only the first step in Disney's "re-engineering" of Mickey -- the way he walks, talks, appears on the Disney Channel and interacts online. 

The game, to be released in 2010 for the Wii, has been created by developer Warren Spector and his team at Junction Point. I rarely like video games, but this one looks different. Spector, in an excellent interview with Time, describes it as a visual marriage between Tim Burton and Walt Disney. That's compelling terrain.

And Spector, a hard-core game nerd and self-described Disney freak, has pulled from the early days of Mickey Mouse, way back to 1928 and Steamboat Willie, when Mickey Mouse was a genuine troublemaker, before he was buffed up to please the widest possible audience.

"The first thing I wanted to do was put Mickey in a world where he's out of place, where he's uncomfortable and has real problems," Spector says. "We've taken him to a strange place where it's a world of forgotten and rejected Disney creativity. There's 80 years of Disney creativity that exists in the archives and we've taken all the stuff that people have forgotten about."

Mickey, Spector reminds, was modeled after the heroic adventurer figure of Douglas Fairbanks and the comic figure of Charlie Chaplin.  Back in the beginning, Mickey could be seen smoking, drinking, even abusing animals. I'm guessing Mickey as smoker, drinker and abuser won't be Disney's ticket to the future.

But as a non-gamer, I'm pretty excited to see the new world in which the reimagined Mickey travels. It sounds like it's a world that extends beyond the five-and-under set. And if Epic Mickey is just the first milestone in Mickey's rebranding, the folks at Disney may be entering a new golden era where what they create matters again. 

Unexpected Connections: Mikhail Gorbachev and Louis Vuitton

In the last few years, I've been writing and editing stories dealing with the luxury world -- mostly in travel, fashion, art and culture. The goal has been to produce well-crafted stories highlighting creative excellence and emerging cities experiencing a massive infusion of money and talent (think Moscow and Beijing). This stuff interests me, and, yes, I expected this could be a long-term plan for continuing and well-paid work.

Be still my beating heart: The world does not always operate according to your plan.

That was before last year's crash, of course, back when advertisers and magazines and high-end brands spent freely and risked the unexpected. (Remember that old principle? You have to spend money to make money?)

And that was back when Louis Vuitton produced a breathtaking ad -- Mikhail Gorbachev sitting in the backseat of a Rolls Royce, an LV leather bag at his side, gazing out at a section of the Berlin Wall.  The concept was developed in Paris and shot in Berlin by Annie Leibowitz. Donations were made to Gorbachev's Green Cross International and Al Gore's The Climate Project.

For me, it was really an extraordinary reminder of how much the world had changed. That the former leader of the Soviet Union could now be involved in an advertising campaign with a luxury fashion brand. That the old alliances are not the new alliances. That power has changed hands. That a former Communist boss felt free enough to reflect on his loss of influence and engage in a most unlikely partnership -- for all the world to see. 

I want to remember that fine work and share it with you here.