You seem to be implying that there weren't any successful sci-fi movies or TV shows prior to Star Wars. No 2001 A Space Odyssey, no Logan's Run, no Silent Running, no Forbidden Planet, no Star Trek/Lost in Space/Twilight Zone TV series......I could go on and on. It depends on how you want to define successful. "2001" was successful, but not the same boxoffice success of more conventional movies of the time. "Star Trek" got cancelled in its second season and brought back to limp through a third before being cancelled for good. Luckily, that third season is what allowed it to have enough episodes to get into syndication and find a new and larger audience. Here's a neat site listing the longest running weekly series: http://www.angelfire.com/trek/proutsy/ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm Boxoffice sales, adjusted for ticket price inflation, don't show a single pre-"Star Wars" science fiction movie in the top 100. There was little reason for anybody to expect "Star Wars" to become the phenomenom that it did. There were a lot of people hoping that it would be successful enough to invigorate the genre. If you get a chance, try to watch "Empire of Dreams" when it's rerun on A&E or watch the uncut version of it on the trilogy DVD. The creative team behind "Star Wars" expected the movie to make a profit, but what happened still exceeded anybody's expectations--and there was more than one studio bigwig that wanted to pull the plug on the movie before more money was lost. One thing I hadn't known was that George Lucas' deal to trade some of his salary for merchandising rites wasn't based on any great prescience of what would come as much as a belief that he could do a better job of using the toys to help sell the movie than the studio would. Up till then, movie merchandising wasn't very successful. > Throughout all of human history, V3 has never once gone out of style yet -- if you know what I mean. V1 & V2 went out of style when V3 was released and the same will happen to V3 when V4 comes out. They're all evolutions of the same figure and you're right that they're sure bets for clothing sales, but I wouldn't want to make my bets that a half dozen years old Poser figure has enough of "all of human history" behind it to gauge what's popular for the rest of human history. Nobody expected Westerns to go away forty years ago. Not many industry experts expect them to make a comeback today. A lot of entertainment experts said that sitcoms were dead twenty years ago and then the "Cosby Show" came out and proved them wrong. If there were only a single-minded obsessivenes in only making Vicki products, the Poser market would choke itself to death. Fortunately, there are content creators providing other products, different characters, props, environments, etc. that allow artists to readily create full-fledged 3D scenes. It's that variety that keeps Poser interesting. DAZ used to have a listing of their top selling products, that I can't find anymore, but they weren't all Vicki products. I like the thought of a lot of the independent Poser content creators banding together to create an alternative marketplace that gives their wares better visibility. The independent artists, in virtually any medium, tend to be the ones stretching what can be done in their creative fields. Large corporations tend to play it safe. Anything that makes it easier for independents to flourish is a good thing. It's always fun to seeing creative mavericks bucking the system.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon