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elimination of cultural difference. McNamara assured an Australian journalist: “The show is Australian through and through” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2). At the time of writing, neither American nor Australian responses are known. However, the summer release in the US – like that of Neighbours – is significant. This is the holiday season, the season when stations introduce material in which they place less market faith. Neighbours’s failure in the American market begs questions about the differential circulation there of Australian televisual and filmic texts. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have argued the centrality of television to the modern nation-state’s basic reliance on . . . the nuclear family as the basis for social order, as the site of morality and for the organization of desire . . . . Through (modern) television, the nation could be forged into an encompassing imagined community in a way which was both more extensive and intimate than the newspaper – Benedict Anderson’s exemplary medium endowed with this role – was able to achieve. (Stratton and Ang 1994) Television’s homogenizing rhetorical space appears to be particularly resistant in the American case to incursions from outside its boundaries. Film differs somewhat. While both film and television production in the US are safely dominant in their local market, film eludes the familiar and familial domestic space of television. Crocodile Dundee succeeded strikingly in lowering the threshold of recognition of Australian media product in America. Yet, despite the film’s massive success in Australian terms (US$174 million US gross box-office, far above Crocodile Dundee 2, second at US $109 million, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, third at US$36 million), it has made less great waves in US market terms. Among Variety’s “All-Time Champs of the 1980s,” it ranked only twenty-third, sandwiched between Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Fatal Attraction, and earned only 31 percent of the takings of the top film, E.T. (Variety 1993: 10). Neighbours’s failure in the US television market should be measured not only in terms of the fact that US television is more strenuously resistant to foreign imports than is US film distribution–exhibition, but also in terms of the relative lack of success, by American standards, of even Australia’s greatest film export success. France: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals” Neighbours play a particular role in Australia. In that country of infinite spaces, the sparse population must practise solidarity and good neighbourliness to survive. In an urban environment, however [sic], caring quickly descends to malevolent snooping. Faced with this soap, it is difficult to observe the evangelical precept of loving one’s neighbours as one loves oneself. (A.W. 1989: 7)
DOI link for elimination of cultural difference. McNamara assured an Australian journalist: “The show is Australian through and through” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2). At the time of writing, neither American nor Australian responses are known. However, the summer release in the US – like that of Neighbours – is significant. This is the holiday season, the season when stations introduce material in which they place less market faith. Neighbours’s failure in the American market begs questions about the differential circulation there of Australian televisual and filmic texts. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have argued the centrality of television to the modern nation-state’s basic reliance on . . . the nuclear family as the basis for social order, as the site of morality and for the organization of desire . . . . Through (modern) television, the nation could be forged into an encompassing imagined community in a way which was both more extensive and intimate than the newspaper – Benedict Anderson’s exemplary medium endowed with this role – was able to achieve. (Stratton and Ang 1994) Television’s homogenizing rhetorical space appears to be particularly resistant in the American case to incursions from outside its boundaries. Film differs somewhat. While both film and television production in the US are safely dominant in their local market, film eludes the familiar and familial domestic space of television. Crocodile Dundee succeeded strikingly in lowering the threshold of recognition of Australian media product in America. Yet, despite the film’s massive success in Australian terms (US$174 million US gross box-office, far above Crocodile Dundee 2, second at US $109 million, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, third at US$36 million), it has made less great waves in US market terms. Among Variety’s “All-Time Champs of the 1980s,” it ranked only twenty-third, sandwiched between Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Fatal Attraction, and earned only 31 percent of the takings of the top film, E.T. (Variety 1993: 10). Neighbours’s failure in the US television market should be measured not only in terms of the fact that US television is more strenuously resistant to foreign imports than is US film distribution–exhibition, but also in terms of the relative lack of success, by American standards, of even Australia’s greatest film export success. France: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals” Neighbours play a particular role in Australia. In that country of infinite spaces, the sparse population must practise solidarity and good neighbourliness to survive. In an urban environment, however [sic], caring quickly descends to malevolent snooping. Faced with this soap, it is difficult to observe the evangelical precept of loving one’s neighbours as one loves oneself. (A.W. 1989: 7)
elimination of cultural difference. McNamara assured an Australian journalist: “The show is Australian through and through” (quoted by Gill 1993: 2). At the time of writing, neither American nor Australian responses are known. However, the summer release in the US – like that of Neighbours – is significant. This is the holiday season, the season when stations introduce material in which they place less market faith. Neighbours’s failure in the American market begs questions about the differential circulation there of Australian televisual and filmic texts. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have argued the centrality of television to the modern nation-state’s basic reliance on . . . the nuclear family as the basis for social order, as the site of morality and for the organization of desire . . . . Through (modern) television, the nation could be forged into an encompassing imagined community in a way which was both more extensive and intimate than the newspaper – Benedict Anderson’s exemplary medium endowed with this role – was able to achieve. (Stratton and Ang 1994) Television’s homogenizing rhetorical space appears to be particularly resistant in the American case to incursions from outside its boundaries. Film differs somewhat. While both film and television production in the US are safely dominant in their local market, film eludes the familiar and familial domestic space of television. Crocodile Dundee succeeded strikingly in lowering the threshold of recognition of Australian media product in America. Yet, despite the film’s massive success in Australian terms (US$174 million US gross box-office, far above Crocodile Dundee 2, second at US $109 million, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, third at US$36 million), it has made less great waves in US market terms. Among Variety’s “All-Time Champs of the 1980s,” it ranked only twenty-third, sandwiched between Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Fatal Attraction, and earned only 31 percent of the takings of the top film, E.T. (Variety 1993: 10). Neighbours’s failure in the US television market should be measured not only in terms of the fact that US television is more strenuously resistant to foreign imports than is US film distribution–exhibition, but also in terms of the relative lack of success, by American standards, of even Australia’s greatest film export success. France: “Viewers have been bluffed by vandals” Neighbours play a particular role in Australia. In that country of infinite spaces, the sparse population must practise solidarity and good neighbourliness to survive. In an urban environment, however [sic], caring quickly descends to malevolent snooping. Faced with this soap, it is difficult to observe the evangelical precept of loving one’s neighbours as one loves oneself. (A.W. 1989: 7)
ABSTRACT
STEPHEN CROFTS