TVloop Blog

When I wrote a post last week about Lost Untangled, the new Lost-oriented Web series produced by ABC, I was unaware that the exact concept has been in production for around four years by Benni and Rafi Fine.  But after reading a piece from TubeFilter, I felt compelled to give the Fine Brothers their due since they’ve been producing their Lost parody, Lost - What Happens Next?,  since 2004.  Here’s the most recent installation of the series:

The similarities are obvious including the exact same action figures, camera angles, and over-the-top voice-overs, and the brothers Fine are none to happy about it per their blog post. Here’s just a snippet of what they had to say:

Here we are, on the web for over 4 years, having created one of the most popular web series with millions of views, and LOST of all places actually comes through with this brilliant form of additional content for their established show, and rather than come to the source, to us, the web creator hungry for the opportunity to break into television- no. They do it in house, and on their own.– Again to be clear we don’t know what happened here, but it is a shame networks and executives hungry for ideas do not search the web for existing content that could help their brands thrive.

Who knows what really happened here.  ABC could have seen the Fine Brothers’ work and decided that it was a great idea that could be done in house to stay on brand message, or this could just be a huge coincidence.  I would tend to go with the first option as Disney has a well-earned reputation for being fiercely protective of it’s brands and intellectual property.  And rightfully so I might add considering the company has billions upon billions of dollars tied up in valuable brand assets.  That said, it would have been nice to see ABC fully embrace the parody the Fine Brothers are working on as they’re obviously doing it well with over 4 million views to date on YouTube alone.

What do you guys think? Missed opportunity by ABC?