Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger & Transmedia Brand Licensing by Avi Santo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger & Transmedia Brand Licensing by Avi Santo Britta Hanson Avi Santo, Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger & Transmedia Brand Licensing. University of Texas Austin, 2015. 331pages. ISBN: 978-0-292-77254-0. Selling the Silver Bullet is an engaging and eminently readable account of what on the surface would seem to be a less than scintillating corner of the media landscape: the licensing of a given character brand to ancillary markets. Santo’s way into this rich area of study is The Lone Ranger, the character invented in the early 1930s by an advertising firm for radio, and who over the next 80 years was depicted in everything from linoleum floors to the infamous 2013 film of the same name. Santo’s primary argument is that we should consider licensing as a form of creative labor. He supports this claim by showing how the companies responsible for the Lone Ranger’s licensing played a crucial role in the management of the brand; specifically, how they maintained the consistency of the brand’s identity, facilitated its dissemination, and influenced the understanding of the brand’s meaning through timely, shrewd product deployment. This argument places the book at a fruitful crossroads between traditional media studies discussions of authorship and more communication studies-oriented approaches to brands, ancillary products, and business cultures. Thus, Santo does an admirable job of situating his historically based argument within the current scholarship on transmedia phenomena, which has previously focused almost exclusively on contemporary media. As Santo states, “digital tools are by no means the only nor even the primary way to connect consumers and intensify their investment in a particular brand” (70). He is careful not to let any one of these approaches overwhelm the others, however, instead only engaging with outside scholarship to the extent that it aids his own argument. And while Santo is carving out a new place for licensing in our understanding of the media industries, his consideration of corporate authorship is an excellent way to reframe longstanding debates. An especially focused and thought-provoking section in this regard is his examination of the heated legal battles over The Lone Ranger during the 1940s in chapter four, particularly its owners’ fight for authorial recognition based on its “managerial acumen” rather than its creative labor. The associated 1942 court case allows Santo to delineate the corporate workflow of LRI, the advertising firm responsible for The Lone Ranger, in relation to the brand, and more broadly, the corporate thinking that went into the conception of a purposefully reproducible yet distinct character. The structure of the book in some ways mirrors the rise and fall of the Masked Man himself. The first five of the eight chapters (two-thirds of the book’s length, by page count) focus on The Lone Ranger’s heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s. During this period, the Ranger’s popularity rivaled Superman’s, and Santo not only traces how licensing shaped and buoyed that success, but also the larger lineage of character licensing practices in the American context. These chapters are bolstered by their deep and detailed use of archival records and artifacts. Santo’s wealth of information allows him to focus on only the most choice, compelling examples, and since these chapters cover only 20 years, he is able to tailor his argument closely to that modest duration. The last third of the book – the last three chapters – is less assured. These chapters address the uneasy road of the Lone Ranger from the waning of his popularity in the late 1950s until the present day. It is hard to lay the blame for the problem entirely at Santo’s [End Page 82] feet, as the book must advance through fifty years of more-or-less unremarkable history before it can explore 2013’s The Lone Ranger and all that film has to say about heritage brands. In addition, Santo does not have the same extensive access in this later period to the corporate documents in question, forcing him to approach an already staid era from the outside rather than from within. In order to advance through so many years...