Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event - Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary

Given the rise in media/brand anniversaries, I consider Doctor Who's 50th in 2013 as a case study. Such anniversaries could be dismissed as pseudo-events, but we should not devalue them as mere hype. Instead, I deploy a paratextual approach, developed to become more phenomenological. Rather than focusing on paratext-text relations, the media/brand anniversary raises questions of inter-paratextual, para-paratextual and meta-paratextual relationships of meaning. I also address how media/cultural studies and philosophical approaches to "media events" may be useful, arguing that previous work has overly emphasized the ritual centrality (and national unification) of media events. I conclude that a rigorously paratextual take on anniversaries as "unfolding events" is required. This Introduction thus develops, and contests, theorizations emerging from the paratextual cohort in screen studies.