And Now It's Time to Say Good-bye...

On the up side...well, where is the up side of all this commercial wrangling? Who benefits? Certainly not the stockholders of Havas Interactive, unless their attorneys can pull a huge rabbit out of their hat. The former development team members opened bottles of champagne when they were subpoenaed to give depositions. Word is that not one of them said anything which will support Sierra's case (Havas owns Sierra, so I use the names interchangeably). The customers of Toy Vault aren't going to benefit from this. The hard-core collectors may have found a few things to complain about with Toy Vault's long lead times and the production problems that occurred with the Lord of the Nazgul figure (heck, even my liner comments were truncated). Toy Vault's owners can't be thrilled with having been forced to wag the lawyers at their competition. Toy Biz might come out smelling like a rose, but then, they haven't made much noise about insisting on faithfulness to anything. Their stockholders may breathe a sigh of relief as the money starts rolling in but Toy Biz is a division of the financially troubled Marvel Enterprises. Marvel hasn't come out of the woods yet, last I heard. And then there are the movies themselves. We've been intimately analyzing every spy report, news report, report analysis, and photograph to emerge from New Zealand. A few eager beavers even tried to capitalize on the interest by stealing stuff from the production, in some cases offering it for sale on the Internet (but did anyone actually get to buy the stuff?). So far everyone seems to have been caught. Even an occasional Web site or two has been embarrassed by posting stuff it shouldn't have, and the material was quickly taken down (and I'm not referring to just one Web site -- there have been quite a few of these incidents, over different materials). So far, the curious fans have been forgiven their curiosity-driven enthusiasm. No real harm done, and the super-hardened criminals have all been sentenced to gruelling punishments like revealing their names, 250 hours of community service, and never working in the New Zealand film industry again (anyone remember the extra who talked and was promptly fired? -- notice they aren't firing extras now when they talk about how well-treated they are). Let's face it, folks. The Mickey Mouse Club (from whose farewell song I took the title of this article) never told stories like this

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