"Heaven Can Wait," Dolphin-Safe Tuna and the Dawn of Disruption

Millennials (the younger ones, anyway) and Gen Zers certainly seem to be a bossy bunch, making clear to brands across the land that if they expect to do business with them they had better be doing good deeds, reflecting their value system and generally being stand-up companies -- or no business will be done at all.  That’s fine, as each generation is entitled to define itself as it sees fit, but the idea that this is something new just doesn’t wash.  The video above -- a clip from the 1978 comedy Heaven Can Wait, at the time of its release a very modern remake of the 1941 classic Here Comes Mr. Jordan -- offers proof.

You won’t get a recap of the entire movie here.  (If you haven’t seen it, find it and enjoy yourself.  If you have, watch it again.  It holds up nicely, and Warren Beatty and Julie Christie still come off as one of the hottest on-screen couples in the history of film.)  What matters is the content of this clip, in which a “new” CEO (the quotes are deliberate) challenges the board of his company to “play fair” and “be the good guys.”  Why?  Because consumers are up in arms over many of the corporation’s practices.  This scene has stayed with me since I first saw Heaven because one of those practices is the slaughter of porpoises while catching tuna, which the company markets.  At the very same time that this movie was released, animal rights organizations were raising awareness of this atrocity in real life, and people – especially young people -- responded in droves, circulating 

Ed Martin

Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage.  He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a… read more