Marshall Brain's Blog

I have a number of friends who won't go see the Flight 93 movie because they feel that Hollywood is capitalizing on a tragedy. Also, no one really knows what happened on the flight, and they don't like the fact that much of the movie is therefore fiction or conjecture.

And there is some reason to believe that the "official version" of the story is purposefully different from reality. It is odd, for example, that the cockpit tapes from the flight were withheld for years, and then coincidentally released right before the movie. But that is a whole different discussion.

The thing I did want to mention is that the Flight 93 movie is just one step on the path to completely trivializing 9/11. How trivial will it get? For a perspective, you can look at a recent museum exhibit that came to Raleigh, NC. It dealt with the Titanic.

In the Titanic tradgedy, 1,517 people died. In other words, the number is comparable to the number of lives lost in 9/11. At the time, the loss of the Titanic and that many lives truly was a tragedy. But today it is a marketing event, as you could see when you walked through the required gift shop at the end of the exhibit. There you could buy Titanic lolipops, Titanic coal (from the boilers), Titanic stemware, and even a Titanic game. Yes, both a board game and a computer game are available based on the tragedy.

One day, you will be able to go to a local museum and experience the 9/11 traveling exhibit. It will let you see a recreation of a typical cube farm in one of the towers, stand on a recreated observation deck and look at still photos of the skyline, and probably get into an authentic recreation of one of the WTC elevators. At the end will be a gift shop complete with 9/11 lolipops.

Perhaps this is all part of the healing process after a tragedy like this. But if so, why not speed up the process? Flight 93 has opened the tragedy to commerce. Who can be first to market with the 9/11 board game?