Playboy and Disney have fast-growing cable services in common
That's it. It's the ears. They both have big ears. In the iconography of American entertainment, there are two symbols that instantly conjure up one-word responses: Playboy's stylized bunny connotes "sex" and Disney's geometric logo type mouse suggests "family." But the bunny and the mouse have more than just prominent ears in common. Playboy equals naughty adult fun; Disney, whole some kid fun. Disney and Playboy are both purveyors of fantasy: Playboy makes real women seem unreal; Disney makes unreal adventures seem real. The Playboy mansion is a sort of Disneyland for adults; Disneyland is the Playboy mansion for kids.
The symbols identify two of the nation's newest, fastest-growing pay cable services, both of which are aggressively capitalizing on their noted (and notorious) images. Since its start in November, the Playboy Channel has been adding subscribers at an average rate of 25,000 a month, yielding a current total of more than half a million. The Disney Channel, whose launching last April was the most loudly trumpeted in cable history, now has nearly 350,000 subscribers, or 75,000 more than the company projected for this point.
What Disney and Playboy offer, notes Paul Kagan, publisher of Pay TV New-letter and a respected analyst of the industry, is "a departure from the essentially movie based programming of HBO. Showtime, Cinemax and The Movie Channel. They are not trying to be all things to all people." As exponents of the technique of "narrowcasting" (aiming at a relatively small and well-defined audience), the two channels add what cable pros call "complementary tiers" to the mix of available programming.
The Playboy Channel, which airs daily from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., E.S.T., is an expanded video version of Publisher Hugh Hefner's glossy magazine, minus the good writing. Ribald Classics presents softcore, soft-minded dramatizations of often less than classic tales in a visual style somewhat reminiscent of gauzy old Clairol commercials. Playboy on the Scene brings the monthly centerfolds to life, though not intelligent life, in filmed segments showing their phantasmagoric photo sessions (as Miss December dutifully undrapes for the 9th time, she purrs: "I'm a very touchy-feely person"). The two smirky anchors of Sexcetera . . . The News According to Playboy purport to examine sexual mores. One typically feeble attempt at jocularity: in profiling the teacher of an acting school for X-rated movies, the woman anchor remarks that the instructor "helps the actors stay on top of things."
The Great American Strip-Off is a continuing series of competitions across the country in which overzealous but ever smiling amateurs take it all off (except for a G string) in hopes of winning a crisp $1,000 bill. Marginally less revealing, but equally energetic, is Shake It Sexy, an intermittently topless American Bandstand for grownups. No matter how crude the content, the channel's packaging is often stylish, and its standard never exceeds medium-core (full frontal nudity for women only). It is suffused with blow-dried sensuality and is innocently convinced that S-E-X is the single most important thing in the universe, period.